Shakespeare Right and Wrong

In an interview in Gambit in 1970, Edward Bond remarked that, as a society, “we use the play [King Lear] in a wrong way. And it’s for that reason I would like to rewrite it so that we now have to use the play for ourselves, for our society, for our time, for our problems.” ¹ For Bond, “wrong” Shakespeare is academic Shakespeare, while “right” Shakespeare is a transformed and contemporary Shakespeare. Bond’s clear-cut division of approaches to Shakespeare is quintessentially modernist in its rejection of “museum” Shakespeare in favour of a reworked classic for our time. His division of approaches into right and wrong also points to the main line of argument I wish to explore in relation to one particular production: the idea of style—the central issue of modernism—as not just an interpretive and ideological tool but also a moral one. The area of my special interest is the early Soviet period.

Within the general trend of modernizing Shakespeare in the West from the 1960s on, Macbeth has been the “trademark” avant-garde play, its primitivism and anarchism being particularly attractive characteristics. These are also some of the obvious attractions of this play for the high modernist period. In 1924, the great Soviet Ukrainian director Les’ Kurbas (1887–1937) conceived of a production of Macbeth in terms almost identical to those of Edward Bond. Kurbas wrote that “Our approach to Shakespeare naturally must be the approach of our day. The restoration of Shakespeare in the manners and customs of his time is formally impossible and in essence unnecessary. The whole value of the scenic embodiment of a classical work in our day lies namely in the ability to present a work in the refraction of the prism of the contemporary world view.” ² For Kurbas, it was particularly important that the performance not “decline” into literature but that it remain theatre. The text should therefore remain only one of the materials at the disposal of the creative actor; it was to be a tool, not a tyrant.

A polymath, Oleksandr (Les’) Zenon Stepanovych Kurbas was an actor, director, playwright, translator, pedagogue, theorist, cinematographer, musician, and costume designer. Himself an “epoch” in the Ukrainian theatre—as one of his contemporaries referred to him ³ —Kurbas influenced hundreds of artists involved with the theatrical and cinematographic arts. Introducing Shakespeare into Ukraine after a century of tsarist prohibitions, Kurbas prepared four plays (Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Othello, King Lear) and did preliminary work on five others (Hamlet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Twelfth Night, Timon of Athens, Antony and Cleopatra), intending, eventually, to produce the whole Shakespearean canon; however, the only play which was actually staged in its entirety was Macbeth. Kurbas produced four variants of the play, the fourth of which, staged in 1924, was the most radical. Before proceeding further, it is perhaps necessary and useful to explain that I regard the avant-garde as both a radical, ground-breaking offshoot of modernism focussed on experimentation and process and, also, as the expression of a left-wing political stance aimed at the total repudiation of bourgeois culture. In Eastern Europe this repudiation meant the rejection, for the first time, of “the national character and didactic pathos of earlier literature,” as well as the erasure, as in other, Western modernist projects, of the boundaries between art forms and genres, between “high” and “low.” ⁴ This double task may be seen in the work of Kurbas; thus, in his view, his 1924 production was both left and right; that is, inspired by a left-wing ideology but thoroughly “correct” in its view and use of Shakespeare.

Shortly after the première of Kurbas’s Macbeth, one of the actors in the production, Vasyl’ Vasyl’ko, recorded in his diary that a “bomb went off, throwing such sparks into the audience that even on the second and the third day [all of] Kyiv shouted ‘gvalt’” ⁵ From the point of view of Vasyl’ko and many of the actors, as well as a good portion of the audience, Macbeth was a tremendous success, as the thundering...