Hearing with Eyes: Watching Shakespeare

This article recounts the author's (an RSC 'regular') experiences of watching three foreign-language productions of Shakespeare plays, staged as part of the RSC's 'Complete Works' year in 2006: Twelfth Night (performed in Russian by Cheek By Jowl); the multi-lingual Midsummer Night's Dream, performed by actors each of whom used his/her own native Indian language and sometimes English; and the production in Japanese by the Ninagawa Company of Titus Andronicus. Focusing on the last of these, the article considers the ways in which viewing the production in a foreign language accentuated the experience of watching the performance, drawing attention to the new and revealing sensation of hearing a familiar play made unfamiliar. The power of the unfamiliar language to simultaneously distance and draw in the spectator (or perhaps draw them in because they are distanced), even when they have seen the play many times over, the article suggests, becomes central to refocusing the audience's attention on the visual (the production's overwhelming patterns of gesture and movement and costume), forcing them to 'hear with their eyes.' By emphasising the amount of 'work' these productions require on the part of their audience, the article ultimately seeks to demonstrate the extent to which productions such as these seem to awaken their spectators, forcing them to attend with extra concentration, and making them active watchers: that, in the case of these productions, at least, watching Shakespeare becomes a way of watching ourselves.