Shakespeare Transformed: Two Comedies in St. Petersburg

Like many people who have at least once attended a production by Alexander Morphov, I had my misgivings when buying a ticket for his Midsummer Night's Dream, commissioned for an open-ended run beginning in the March of 2008 by the St. Petersburg Komissarzhevsky Theatre (named after a celebrated nineteenth-century Russian actress). Morphov is well known for radical, innovative approaches that often perplex and annoy theatrical professionals and the general public. His Shakespeare's Tempest and Molière's Don Juan have been running in Komissarzhevsky's repertory for a few years, and are probably best described as variations on the plays known under these names. Taking extravagant liberties with the text has been practically de rigueur in much post-Soviet theatre, at least when dealing with non-native and therefore less familiar classics, as has been the use (and abuse) of avant-garde, heavily experimental stagecraft, much of it borrowed wholesale from the West. In many Russian Shakespearean productions of the last few years, directorial ingenuity has been going well beyond the kinds of revisionism that is practiced in typical high-profile English and American productions. One unfortunate result of such experimentation is that almost any Shakespearean production one encounters in St. Petersburg or Moscow may seem more of a commentary on a given play's critical and performance history than a self-contained theatrical event. I do not know to what extent the amount of innovation that accompanies many Russian productions of Shakespeare reflects directorial desire to re-think and re-invent specifically Shakespeare and to what extent it is a mere corollary of a director's overindulgence in contemporary theatrical fads. If it is the former, then I fear that most directorial revisionism is lost on the vast majority of the Russian public-whose median age is about thirty-five and who either has no previous acquaintance with a given play, or has made that acquaintance through another, also bewilderingly experimental, production. A seasoned student of Shakespeare may indeed be amused by something like the excessively stylized Hamlet that has been playing at the famous Moscow Arts Theatre for half a decade, in which the deployment of massive cuts and bizarre conventions-in the final duel, for example, Hamlet and Laertes sit at the table throwing up silverware, while others count hits, and then the rest is silence-cannot but prevent the majority of spectators, who don't know the play by heart, from understanding what's going on, let alone from comprehending why what they are watching is one of the greatest Western dramas. So, with Morphov's Tempest, in which Ferdinand and Prospero slap Miranda around for a good five minutes, while she mechanically repeats her name (a commentary on the evils of patriarchy?) still painfully fresh in my mind, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I learned from and enjoyed his Dream.

The curtain rose on the scene with the mechanicals. Their "Pyramus and Thisbe" was an operetta composed by Starveling. Peter Quince, provided by Morphov with a wife, Mary, played a self-absorbed director, dreaming about the accolades his play would garner. Snout was a dead-drunk electrician who kept electrocuting himself; Snug, in blackface and multi-colored bonnet, looking like a Jamaican pot-smoker, was not "slow of study," but a certifiable cretin who only mooed and blubbered. Bottom, played by the company's leading man, the charismatic Alexander Bargman (there was a touch of in-crowd humor in his willingness to take up every part) wore a butcher's apron over a fat suit that emphasized his buttocks and belly. As the distribution of roles commenced, accompanied by hilarious misunderstandings, unself-conscious puns written from scratch, gags and pratfalls, it became clear that these mechanicals came right out of the well-established Russian clownerie tradition. This performance tradition features an array of amusing characters, from regular circus clowns to endearing, silly, existentially confused and melancholy personages in the style of commedia dell' arte, or touching schlemiels reminiscent of Chaplin or early Woody Allen.

More textually orthodox Shakespeare began when the mechanicals finally vacated the stage for...