More Masterpieces

In 1967, I wrote a controversial essay called “No More Masterpieces,” in which, following the French radical theorist Antonin Artaud (The Theatre and Its Double) and the Polish critic Jan Kott (Shakespeare Our Contemporary), I argued against slavish reproduction of classical works. I agreed that we had reached the end of some cycle in staging these plays, that actor-dominated classics, particularly Shakespeare, were beginning to resemble opera more than theatre, with their sumptuous settings, brocaded costume parades, and warbled arias. I believed that modern directors were now obliged to freshen our thinking about classical writers in the same way that modern playwrights (notably O’Neill, Cocteau, Sartre, and T.S. Eliot) were freely revisioning the Greeks.

My hope was for approaches that would revitalize familiar works wrapped in a cocoon of academic reverence or paralyzed by arthritic convention. Theatre, being a material medium, was settling too cozily into ostentatious display, disregarding the poetic core of a text, its thematic purpose and inner meaning. One way to avoid this, I thought, was through metaphorical investigation by an imaginative director, in close collaboration with a visionary designer, locating the central image of a play through visual icons and a unified style.

This was what Peter Brook was doing with the Royal Shakespeare Company in his revitalized productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream (channeling its youthful energies into acrobatics and circus acts) and King Lear (translating its vision of old age and death into a bleak visual vocabulary influenced by Beckett). Such productions were making Shakespeare our contemporary through suggestive associations, bringing audiences a fresh appreciation of classics in danger of dying from hardened stage arteries.

There was another modernizing technique already in vogue at the time called “Updating.” This approach relocated a classical play in some later time and place, thereby demonstrating its “relevance” through a more contemporary environment. Updating was the style usually associated with Michael Benthall’s Old Vic and the Stratford Shakespeare Theatre in Connecticut and the early Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis. Guthrie himself called this process “jollying Shakespeare up.”

Jollying Shakespeare up gave us such novelties as a Measure for Measure set in Freud’s Vienna, a Much Ado About Nothing relocated in Spanish Texas, and a Troilus and Cressida occurring during the American Civil War—creating geographical transplants that managed to provide visual surprise and an illusion of immediacy without any particular insight into the heart of the play. (To my disgrace, I myself once directed a production of Macbeth set in Stonehenge, featuring extraterrestrial witches.) Updating was an improvement on traditional Shakespeare, but it was nevertheless a visual and histrionic rather than a metaphorical and imaginative act. I preferred an approach that would navigate between the Scylla of dry academicism and the Charybdis of empty fashion.

A few of my colleagues thought I had taken leave of my senses, among them John Simon, who believed that classical plays should be produced on stage exactly as they were originally written. My old friend Harold Bloom, battered by bad productions, preferred the theatre in his head, often wondering aloud whether his beloved Shakespeare should be staled on stage at all. I sympathized with Bloom’s frustration, but obviously plays had no real life unless embodied in the flesh of living actors. And to satisfy Simon’s demand for “original intentions,” Shakespeare’s women would have to be played by boys and his Cleopatra would be required to wear a hoop skirt. To me, these were prescriptions for embalming the classics in formaldehyde.

Partly as a result of such debates, we were beginning to witness major changes in classical production. While traditional and updated approaches continued to hold the stage, the succeeding years also saw the rise of the auteur director, claiming the same freedom in regard to theatre texts as the movie director had with screenplays. The result was a host of brilliantly reconstituted and recalibrated, if highly controversial productions. Among the most celebrated of these (after Brook’s original forays) were André Gregory’s Endgame set in a cage to emphasize its claustral atmosphere, performed in a vaudeville style punctuated by old movie comedy soundtracks (some years...