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Shakespeare Quarterly 55.2 (2004) 200-211



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Small-time Shakespeare:

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe, 2003

It is commonly assumed that Shakespeare scholars and teachers can learn something about Shakespeare's plays—about the textual, interpretive, and theatrical possibilities they contain—from productions of these plays at such venues as London's new Globe, Stratford-upon-Avon, and Stratford, Ontario. This essay, which gives an account of sixteen Shakespeare productions and adaptations at the 2003 Edinburgh Festival Fringe, argues that we can also learn something about Shakespeare's plays from productions by high-school students, college students, and amateur theatrical troupes.1 Academic criticism does not pay a great deal of attention to amateur and student productions for what seem like obvious reasons: such productions have limited resources, and the acting is not always very good. But without making unreasonable claims for the pleasures of amateur theatricals, I would like to suggest that, in terms of theater scholarship and theater history, the standards represented by the new Globe, the two Stratfords, and their analogues are too conservative and too homogeneous.

In the pages that follow I will describe what I take to be some remarkable successes by amateur and student performers—moments in which theatrical ideas are conveyed with clarity and energy characteristic of the best acting at any level. I will also describe some predictable failures—moments (or whole productions) in which the opportunity to express a theatrical idea is deliberately squandered, moments that are typical of the most cynical and lazy kind of Shakespearean acting at any level. I am here concerned with something that theater reviews do not focus on enough: the relationship between actors and audience. Amateur productions compel the reviewer to ask "why am I here?" The reasons we go to the Globe or to Stratford-upon-Avon seem self-evident; consequently, it is easy to record the details of those productions so as to suggest that such details are interesting in and of themselves. We become less like audience members and more like stenographers. In contrast, spending a beautiful [End Page 200] evening in Edinburgh watching high-school students perform A Midsummer Night's Dream has tremendous potential to turn us into the kind of playgoers—skeptical, sensitive, protective of our time—who require productions to work for us.

Not all of the productions that I discuss here were presented by amateur or student companies. KAOS Theatre Company (Titus Andronicus) and Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre (Hamlet) are professional companies, the former based in London and the latter in Alaska. But by participating in the Fringe, these professional companies involve themselves in the same fierce competition for audiences and press faced by all groups that come to Edinburgh in August. The anonymity and ephemerality of Fringe productions make this festival a particularly useful site at which to evaluate Shakespeare in performance—a valuable alternative to the more permanent venues and companies with which academic discourse is primarily concerned. On the whole, a Fringe audience has little more to go on than the forty-word blurb (including title!) allotted each play in the Fringe program; had I not seen the KAOS production of Volpone at the Fringe two years earlier, I would have approached their Titus just as I approached the Westview High School Theatre Department's Dream. What's more, a one-to-three-week run is barely time enough to build a following; even professional companies must work within the limitations of their time slot, location, and run. In some cases this is probably advantageous: the KAOS Titus was an exhausting show for actors as well as audiences, but its short run never allowed the exhaustion to show. Of course there are also disadvantages: Fairbanks Shakespeare certainly never got the audience it deserved, because its Hamlet was performed in Dalkeith, a twenty-minute bus ride from Edinburgh, in the middle of the afternoon.

The Festival Fringe marginalizes even well-established companies while reinforcing Shakespeare's centrality to the dramatic tradition: the Bard's name guarantees even the most obscure student theater company a sizeable audience. Expectations...

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