The Death of a Chief : Watching for Adaptation; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bard

The Death of a Chief is an ongoing workshop, presenting an in-progress First Nations adaptation of Julius Caesar. This essay contains both an initial reaction to the workshop and later reflections upon that reaction, which together illustrate the need to examine one's own expectations when watching Shakespeare. Initially disappointed by Chief due to its familiar, 'straight' application of Caesar to problems of accountability in leadership, the author later reconsiders his position - the problems, he finds, are not the production's but his own. Having watched Chief with the expectation of a postcolonialist response to Shakespeare, the potential power for a marginalized community of drawing directly on the power of Shakespeare's language had gone unrecognised. That it is common for directors to cite Shakespeare's 'universality' does not negate the fact that for members of a marginalised or colonised group to do so is to lay claim to that universality. The culturally specific expectations of the non-Native 'Shakespearean' viewer failed to take into account the culturally specific uses of Shakespeare for exorcising certain historical demons by proxy. In turn, this has provoked a different kind of watching: not just looking out for the features of adaptation, but understanding specific cultural needs and dynamics distinct to a particular community at a particular moment.