Welcome, everyone, to Big Tent, Big Ideas. The live online event series from the University of Oxford as part of the Humanities Cultural Programme.
Big tent, big ideas is our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students,
performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines and from the arts and creative sectors.
We'll explore important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment,
medical, humanities, ethics and A.I., the public, the private and the common good.
And we will celebrate storytelling and music, performance and identity.
Everyone is welcome in our big tent. So this is also a celebration of community.
Please make yourself metaphorically as well as literally at home this evening as we explore big ideas generated by Shakespeare's work together.
We're bringing you this event programme online to complement social distance with creative connexions.
We hope that you're all safe and well during this difficult time.
Tonight was to have been the opening night of our first big tent festival here in Oxford.
It would have taken place in an actual big tent on the site of what at the moment is a big patch of mud,
but will one day be the new Schwartzmann Centre for the Humanities. Today is also, as many of you will know, Shakespeare's birthday.
And so it's my great pleasure and honour to host this discussion between Emma Smith and Erika Wyman to intensely engage scholars
and practitioners of theatre and of the public philosophical and political dimension of Shakespeare's work in particular.
Welcome, Emma. And welcome, Erika. I'll embarrass them both by saying a little bit more about them,
their work and why we thought it would be good to bring them together this evening before we start the discussion.
I should also say that if you would like to put forward any questions to us, because during the event tonight,
please just pop them in the comments box on YouTube and we'll answer as many as possible in the Q&A at the end of the discussion.
In other words, in around half an hour's time. So first to Emma.
Emma Smith is tutorial fellow in English. Fellow librarian Hertford College and professor of Shakespeare Studies here at the University of Oxford.
Professor Smith's research combines a range of approaches to Shakespeare and early modern drama.
A recent work has been about the reception of Shakespeare and about scholarly and cultural investments in Shakespearean criticism.
This is Shakespeare. How to Read The World's Greatest Playwright is her latest publication just out.
Now. The book has earned fine praise from many readers.
Alex Preston in The Observer calls it, quote, the best introduction to the place I read.
Perhaps the best book on Shakespeare. Full stop.
For as he goes on to say Emmas work is, quote, again, a model of unpretentious, deeply researched, profoundly approachable criticism.
We are another wedge in for a treat this evening.
All the more so since Emma will be joined by Erica Wineman, deputy artistic director of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Erica joined the Royal Shakespeare Company in January 2013, bringing with her many years of experience in the theatre across the UK.
She works closely with the RSPCA artistic director Gregory Doran on all aspects
of artistic strategy and takes a particular lead on the development of new work,
the contemporary relevance of the repertoire and the national ambitions of the company.
Erica led the team, which opened the other place or reopened the other place in March 2016.
A creative hub dedicated to daring theatrical exploration.
She takes a lead on extending access, equality and diversity across all RSG activities and is passionate about participation in theatre making.
In fact, this has been a longstanding commitment in Erica's life.
Is clear to anyone who has witnessed her properly groundbreaking collaborative work at any stage of her
creative journey from her time here at Oxford studying French and philosophy to the Southern Playhouse.
The gate in Notting Hill, northern stage in Newcastle and now the RISC.
Now, both America and Emma have had recently or recent Shakespeare events cancelled Erica's production
of The Winter's Tale for the Royal Shakespeare Company and launch events for Emma's book.
This is Shakespeare have been for now lost.
So this evening in this big tent, big ideas conversation, Erica and I might discuss their respective productions,
their hopes for them and for the thinking, the research and the practical experimentation that they embody.
But as well as acknowledging loss, they also discuss what Shakespeare can offer us both now and for the future.
So without further ado, I'll disappear from your screens and hand over to Emma to start the discussion proper.
Emma. Thank you. Thanks so much was.
And thanks, everybody, for joining us. Erica, it's brilliant to be able to have this conversation.
And I was just thinking this would probably be week two of the Winter's Tale, wouldn't it?
If if you'd been running to your schedule, where would you be at now in that in the soft life of that production?
Well, I suppose we were really looking forward to Shakespeare's birthday because it's a very special day in Stratford.
So sometimes I've had to open a show on Shakespeare's birthday.
That's a bit too much pressure. So we, too, would have been lovely because we'd have got through our press night and settled into the run.
And we're starting to look forward to the glorious summer on the stages.
I should say that we are still looking forward to getting on stage, on stage.
It hasn't disappeared from view, but we don't know when. So, yeah, I miss it very much.
You've done a really important, hugely important part of the work, which is that long rehearsal period,
which you most of which you must have just about got in before lock down.
Tell me a bit about what what was it what emerged about the play from that period of working late?
Well, it was a very happy process.
I mean, a very rich one and often very demanding intellectually and emotionally, because the play asks so much of the automakers.
But we discovered lots of things. I started out with a kind of provocation to the company that I thought would be interesting to live cuts,
times and places that that brought out of the play. Well, I now sought to be some really timely power relationships.
I suppose I could see I could see in the play the sense of how a man loses his perspective.
And indeed, I think in some ways his mind in service of his need to feel in control and how that resonated politically very strongly.
And so I'd made a decision before we started rehearsals that I wouldn't set it right now because I felt that in a way
would reduce the complexity and kind of gorgeousness of the plan also would make the 16 year gap really challenging.
What does now mean?
So we got interested in 1950, Spain for Cecillia, and we got really interested in a late 1960s, the northeast coast of England for Bohemia,
sort of partly riffing on what I think is quite perverse and delightful and what Shakespeare has done with those two places and sort of,
you know, surprise wanting to surprise people with that and really wanting to avoid a kind of conventional pastoral,
because I find the play doesn't have as much power as is in the text when it's it's reduced to something sort of gentle and idyllic.
I think he writes about places that know about sheep rearing its real work and sees importance and song and dance are important anyway.
The so we explore those things. But I didn't have a solution to perhaps the most famous line on the page except see by bear.
And so a lot of the discoveries were about how of course.
How do you how do you join those two worlds?
And in a sense that it is not moments that Shakespeare provokes us to say.
And now what? What do you expect? And so we got very interested in them.
The women in the play. I mean, it is a play that's got these wonderful women that come to the fore.
Actually, earlier on then people noticed,
I think we were left at the end of three with this terrible sense of injustice towards the women that pool owners articulated so brilliantly.
And it's tricky this because I don't want to give away exactly what we've come up with for the barber.
We we started to find a way that what I'm taking us faces in at three scenes three is is is really her mind.
That's what he's battling with. He's had this amazing vision for mining, which, of course, if you know what happens, is rather peculiar.
And and we got excited by what it might mean if her mining spirit was guiding the next set of events.
So in a way to take take, I'm taking a sick instinct seriously. So the women can take that back seriously and play rate recklessly.
Yeah, I understand. Of all the awful I mean, awful in its real sense, like sort of frightening and inspiring.
Not not that's not a comedy moment, is it? That's not I don't think it is always sort of in danger of tipping into.
Yeah, that's exactly. I don't think it is. I don't think it's absurd. I think he I think Shakespeare builds this sense of.
But the gods. What the gods are going to do. And the sense that the vengeance hasn't dropped down yet.
And I got I got excited by the fact that the next thing we see in here is an taken of wrestling
with questions of of of faith and belief that he doesn't want to believe this preposterous dream.
But he does believe it in this moment. He does believe it. And what he the conclusion he comes to is that he's the kind of.
Jesus figure, I mean, exactly as you park there, then the mischief around religion is really present.
You know, it's one moment where the follow the next minute we've got somebody who needs
to sacrifice themselves in quite a kind of Christian way for the greater good.
And so I was interested in taking it really seriously. So, yeah, he is taking us is not treated kindly by the bar.
But there's more of a kind of food chain quality to it.
We got interested and we learnt we learnt a lot about female bears that are really frightening.
The advice, apparently those people who have to live near bears is if you've got a mother back, you basically just think it's over.
There's nothing you can do. So that was useful to us in trying to understand how one half of the play opens the space for the next half.
I was just reading a book about deaths in Shakespeareans and which had a lot
of very practical sort of information about poisons and that kind of thing.
And one of the things it said was this should not have run away from the bad.
He should have backed away very, very slowly that running away, that makes the bad run, you know, that causes the bad to run, run, run nasty.
But also quite interesting about the extent to which it didn't.
The extent to which this is just a sort of eruption from completely outside the world
of the play and the extent to which it's actually or always been there in some way.
It's it's it's brewed up by the passions of the play.
It's not a. I think people have enjoyed the state's station because it seems so random.
Yes, it pursuit, particularly exit pursued by a bear.
It's the aid that's run the business.
If it works issued by the bear, it would already have been a bit sort of domesticated somehow because we would know,
yeah, there was a bear and that's what he's going to do. What bears? One of the things bears do.
But I suppose the thing that we found way use for rehearsals was thinking about fairytale and not
not in the perhaps the sort of conventional theatrical sense of it being preposterous that almost.
If you look at it through the eyes of a child, actually the great thing about fairy tales is you is the unexpected.
But that doesn't mean it's not psychologically justified.
So I think the thread we started to find was that what chanteys does is put in in train a set
of events that will lead to the extreme unexpected because it's about it's about control.
So certainly that's a reading born of our time about a man who has has become very insecure about his his ability to be a leader, to be a king.
And that manifests itself, of course, in his relationships. But actually immediately it gets sort of spread around the court, the notion of truth.
So we kept talking in the early parts of rehearsals about the nightmare of truth collapsing because it happens almost every scene.
And up to that, more versions of what truth might be just sort of walls fall down.
Not that we we started to get excited that the vengeance or the counterpoint to that is that he isn't in any sense in control.
None of us are as knows as so many Shakespeare's great characters find out that actually you have to surrender to something.
And I think the fairest part of that. I mean, we've made a connexion to something that is embodied by by her mind or her mind, a spirit.
But really, it goes beyond anything earthly. To something we can't control.
That's so interesting.
So just I mean, not necessarily a you to give away the end of your production at all, because we're all really looking forward to seeing that.
But do you feel does look doesn't counties get control back or just does he.
Does he settle himself to the fact that he doesn't have control? That's one of things I've always been really fascinated in about the end of the play.
Is on the one hand, it seems to suggest you put things right by going backwards and getting back something.
And on the other hand, it seems to suggest you put things right by going forwards. And it's it's the next generation who can sort this out.
It's going to. This is we have to just see the ground now to Pettit's and Floras Allende.
You know, young hearts run free. Don't mess up like my Manami kind of thing.
That would be that by sort of inciting for that part of the play.
But both at both the present Shakespeare's Scott Shakespeare or loyalties or the play or something has got one foot
in the idea of the past is the place to get back to and one foot in the idea that somehow that is the present.
I feel that's a very kind of strange thing about the ending. Yeah, I, I do recognise that.
And we've talked a lot about that in particular around the relationship between perplexities 90s,
where there's this app that is harkening for innocence was something in their boyhood and her mind is aware of that very, very early in the play.
This sense of if she could crack that,
she could understand that meant maybe she could help these two men who are both, I think, in a kind of complex pain.
But I don't think the play or in my production,
it doesn't it doesn't work for us to think that they go back because of what happens between Pearline or allowances.
So Rantes offers in that moment that Amani leaves the stage.
We don't we don't know what's gonna happen to it doesn't look good in a in in three key offers,
a kind of classical apology that focuses on the men in his life.
Actually, you know, that is so striking the way he loves Camilla more than anyone else,
because the betrayal of Camilla is so vivid and pulls and it comes charging on the cause take takes in the part magnificently in a way that,
you know, is enviable. And it seems to me that what she does is, is having taken them apart.
She then connects to the idea of grief and what it really means and something in that moment,
something in in his response that where he asks her to lead him to where those bodies are and how he will grieve.
I think he's going forwards into a connexion to his feelings.
That has been the problem. Now, this is a very contemporary reading of it.
I know. But it really held water for us. As the acting choices.
This is a man if only he could have said I'm jealous.
I don't I don't believe you love me anymore. And I'm not sure I'm a very good king, probably.
That would have been a dialogue available to him to get him through without this total collapse.
And what he does, in fact, is find a way of saying, I'm going to be sad about this forever.
And that's a very I mean, to coin your phrase, is a very grown up thing to say.
It doesn't seem in that moment it might be overblown. In fact, it just scratches the surface of what Paul Ayna has suggested.
You know, thousands of you each. He says, OK, I'm going to regret this forever.
So I think it goes forward into emotional maturity. Yeah, too.
Too shall be my recreation or recreation yet.
Yeah, exactly. And and also in the final scene,
the thing that we struggled with and then peculiarly unlocks it for us when we just
when we surrendered as a company and just did it and instead of talking about it,
was the fact that he gives her mining allowances no lines together.
So you got so much talking in the play and there's so much trying to unpack what they're feeling and then envy,
if you if you like, the most critical moment of is it truly possible for them to be together again?
He he doesn't answer that question. And I think that's really significant.
Of course, you can make lots of choices about about rupture or impossibility.
But actually, what we've what we are exploring and really interested in.
Is that that is that is often the truth in human relationships, that there is too much to say and not enough to say,
and do you just take the next step forward, a pattern of flaws that I think are also painted as not having enough answers yet?
You know, they are they're optimists and they're idealists.
Or he years Flora Zella's adjutants very wise and cautious, and therefore neither of them are ready.
But the grown ups have learnt something really, really fundamental.
Men have been vulnerable. Yeah. And that's what seems so interesting about Winter's Tale and I guess maybe the other plays of that late period,
although it's a tragedy where we always talk about self-knowledge and characters learning something,
but tragedies, it doesn't give them any any time to deal with that or to talk to sort of process that act differently in the future.
It's all sort of wonderfully conflagration, Ray.
And and poof, there they are. You know, I now I know I should have been a better king, but I'm dead.
It's the subject is glorious. But it's not doesn't have an emotional trajectory, really.
That seems very plausible. I think that there's something.
There's something very you yeah, I do feel very grown up about.
About a play which says. You really you know, you really screw up and you have to you have to live with yourself.
That's sort of who you are. You have to find a way of living with that.
Yes, that's right. And you are still all of the things that you have done, including the things you did before you screwed up.
Yeah. How to try and understand that. I mean, I think there is something, of course, really,
really magic and peculiar about the moment Atlantes meets Predator, which is is Shakespeare taking a Panopto and saying.
Well, that's that's a bit that's a bit queasy, that's the sort the source suggests something incestuous and really troubling,
but I don't think it's a threat of incest that he leaves.
I think it's a thread of the young man he was because wee wee wee Joe Gluskabe plays Dantes.
He and I talked about beginning about five. It's like he's desiccated.
He has committed himself to grief that he's not alive.
Shakespeare beautifully threads the coming back to life.
And it's and in another is in another sense growing up, because it's it's about feeling desire.
He's had no desire for 16 years because what could you desire when you have.
When your own designs got you into such trouble and there's a desire for life,
I think expressed in that strange moment that panics pull out and off we go.
My great hope that they're both coming back to life in some way and that that's not just that's not just my knee hurts.
That's just the two of them. And it's the it is the case. I think that.
It's so particular that the moment where loyalties dismisses everybody's anxiety and says if if it is if it is madness to be found here,
I'm not quoting Shakespeare,
but if if if that's what if you were all suggesting that it's it's it's mental illness of some kind to want to stay here and see if she's alive,
then that's fine by me. And that seems to be to me, a really wonderful thing to have learnt by yourself that actually this isn't madness.
It just looks OK. Is an amazingly.
Well, it's an amazingly contemporary play, isn't it, until become Mosso? I think one of things I'd love us to be talking about, you know,
in a few months time is how how it's the same and different from the way you were thinking about it.
Well, the company was thinking about it before that, because if it will come, we will we will get it.
But it's not going to be what it would have been quite it if it had been you know,
this opened last week just because the themes of grief and patience and seeing things out on what comes after.
Tragedy, what comes after catastrophe you want? What do we do? What what do we do to rebuild?
All those questions seem. I mean, just amazingly prescient.
But we don't know. We don't have the answers either.
No, we don't know the answers, although it has given me and the company a lot of comfort through these difficult weeks as a play.
I feel very lucky that this is what we were doing.
And funnily enough, on the day the theatres closed, we were bashing away at four because hydrolysed up for slightly differently.
We've done a lot of improvisation, a lot of playing. So we sort of felt that we could do it any which way.
We haven't settled it. And it was therefore wildly too long. Am I supposed to sort of just masturbate in Bohemia?
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And. And, um, for us, you know, 1969, somewhere, somewhere east of Newcastle.
And we were so nourished on that last day by.
What the playoffs. Which is Joy. Just when you think Joy isn't so, it isn't really on the table.
It's not totally appropriate. Come on.
I would be hard to believe in. It just incest takes you by the hand and says, no, we're gonna do daft jokes.
Then we're gonna dance. And or we're going to fall in love and we're gonna dance.
Then we're gonna sing. Yeah, we're gonna do all those things properly until you forget about the tonal problem.
And then we're gonna mention the small matter that we've got to resolve the ending.
And it is so it's so delicious. So what's comforting is that there's a lot of talk in the theatre,
as you can imagine, about what will audiences want or need that none of us can know.
Of course,
the way that gets framed is perhaps were once very bleak work that points out the vulnerabilities in our own in our own less conceptual systems.
Perhaps we'll want to consider the tragedy that is the loss that we're all dealing with in a very real way,
or the anxiety about loss that we're dealing with and other people saying all I'm going to want to watch is comedy.
Light relief enough. And so I really feel fortunate that actually this is traditionally problematic.
Complexity of tone might service rather well because we surely will want both and in different doses at different times.
That will be really fascinating because I suppose ACT has often been a problem in the theatre because it has seemed so long and so inconsequential
it and introduces a whole lot of new characters that put a late point in the play that actually none of them turn out to be important.
And that sort of.
It seemed very, very awkward and very difficult for for four directors to kind of manage and for audiences to follow the tonal changes.
And it's a great thought that we might be exactly what we're ready for. Well, it's funny you say that.
I've got this obsession with not sort of refusing to think that there's a character that isn't important, although, of course, I'm somewhat.
You mean. So I've been really interested in what's going on.
And I made one choice. I made a couple of choices about gender, as you might expect.
So Autolycus is played by women and also perhaps more critically, for what we're talking about, the shepherd.
So. It's a mother, not a father, and it's a mother, therefore, that finds the baby in the wake of the birth.
As we were talking about and it's a mother who has it.
It feels very betrayed by her daughter momentarily anyway,
and has to then find a new footing in Sicilia in terms of discovering the truth about her adopted.
So that's shifted something for us, because actually that feels like a really significant triangle now.
I wish it were different. And we always sort out and I think it's there already.
But it does it does shine a different light on it,
thinking that actually having a loving mother and therefore navigating team of that beats rather than to fathers.
Mm hmm. And I think the young shepherd really matters to me.
Got this wonderful actor playing the young Schepper called William Grant.
And well is his death and is performing in British sign language.
And so he and I have done quite a lot work thinking about how to translate the language.
He's done all the hard work, but it's been very rewarding work.
From my point of view, because it's illuminated how that character arrives with a kind of straight forward attitude to life, death and love.
And so actually, you get this dose of sanity. If you think of the play as the sort of kind of madness.
I mean, he's not alone. But he's got the clearest, most open sense of what's right, what's wrong.
And people die. And that's horrifying and should give us pause and we should mourn them and we should work properly and then we should move on.
So there's this, I suppose I think the Bohemia offers this sense of what community should really be like.
And that, I do think is going to speak to us, given what we've all been through and what we are lacking and may be lacking for quite a long time.
I think you're absolutely right.
I think it's so striking that the beginning of the of lockdown, all the stuff was, you know, King Lear and the plague and a precisely that.
What will you say that somehow bleak tragedy is the way to, too?
Is there any way to respond to this, that this this kind of situation and I don't think that is going to be that isn't going to be the case.
But this is a really well-placed, interestingly place play, which will look different.
I mean, that's one of Shakespeare's extraordinary properties, isn't it, that kind of ability to.
So kind of already be there when you're when you find yourself in a different place.
You go back to Shakespeare and Shakespeare is kind of there. Some have been there already.
It's weird. Yeah, I'm not. I wanted to ask you about that because I.
I have found your book so helpful in in being able to think about.
How to how to make room for ourselves without taking the play a part reducing play.
Now, I've admired lots of great Shakespeare productions which have reduced the play and have made a great evening in the theatre,
but I'm not interested in doing that. I'm really excited by the whole thing. I'm editing it.
But my question is, in these weeks, has it seem to you that there are new.
Even new gaps or new or new things to fill the gaps in Shakespeare that you hadn't seen before.
I think deaf. I think absolutely. Definitely. I think I mean, it's been really interesting to see.
For one thing, it's been very interesting to see the turn turned to Shakespeare.
That has been. It's also surprising and kind of wonderful.
I mean, I think Patrick Stewart's sonnet reading, which has been a real kind of viral hit, as it were.
It is. I mean, it's been an extraordinary moment is extraordinary to have, for example, poetry on the Today, a poem on the Today programme.
You know, you think how. How serious have is this situation when we you know, it's poetry we have to turn to?
So I think I think there's been in a way that perhaps what literary criticism has been embarrassed by,
which is the idea that I don't know, the literary text might be conciliatory, might be helpful.
Might might be. It's sort of ethically regenerative in some way.
We've been a little bit cynical about that and a little bit snide about that, and it's very,
very interesting to see it come back and to see when people are looking at a sort of stripped
down life or a stripped down world or a sort of stripped down sense of what they do every day.
Funnily enough, the sense that art is as a kind of spiritual kind of sustenance or a kind of intellectuals of creative sustenance.
That's that's come back. And it's it's it's very interesting to see Shakespeare in, you know, in that insular pole position in that.
I mean, I went back to the the work that I don't talk about my book at all because I
always feel I actually feel I do get the poems as much as as as the as the plays.
I don't find the poems as as spacious as I find the plays.
And that's partly because of that mauls of moral objects sort of focus is partly because the sonnets,
which are so technically beautiful, I find them very cold myself.
And they don't really they don't work for me, which probably I'll probably be sacked.
Now, having said that, but I went back to the innocent aloneness,
which is a poem we do know Shakespeare wrote during plague times and where what
seems is really interesting thing about the comparison with with Winter's Tale,
I think because I think what Venus, Venus and Adonis is about,
the goddess Venus is in love with Adonis who prefers to go hunting and doesn't doesn't want anything to do with her.
So it's about this unrequited desire. And she feels to me like, you know, in the plague situation,
she is on the side of comedy and saying, come on with you know, with is human can is connexion.
It's it's it's community. It's being together. It's creativity. That's what going to fight this.
And he is a tragic character and saying, you know, keep away from me.
I'm I'm on my own. You know, I'm in my own world of important masculinity.
I think it is gendered.
And I suddenly thought, yeah, well, you know, she she goes off as a great line at the end that she she goes off to a mill herself.
She goes off to quarantine, really to self isolation. But I'm reading it now, I think.
Yeah, well, she'll be back. Venus will be back in the day. Dennis made the wrong call.
I think so. So it's been great to go for me to go back to things that I hadn't found a way that they would speak to me,
which is what we've always done with Shakespeare, isn't it?
I mean, really famously those things like, you know, Toilsome Tresidder and nobody ever knew what to do with it until the Vietnam War.
And suddenly it seemed like the most appropriate play of all measure for measure or something,
which we've had a great review of in this old me to era.
So it's you know, it's great to see that.
Yeah, that's interesting. That's brilliant. But it isn't.
And if I really agree and it makes me think something about the beginning of The Winter's Tale with which I'm obsessed.
Forgive me. But actually, some of the some of the things we had been talking about around the early 50s and kind of post fascist world,
I think I had a lens on that, which was about.
Putting it putting war and fascism behind us, which feels like it's something that would have resonated with Shakespeare,
putting turmoil in that sense and tyranny, he might put it behind him.
Moving on, trying to move on, allowances can't move on. And I think.
Joe, Alafair, you give me say this, but I think I wasn't very sympathetic to not being able to move on.
I think there's a part of me stuck in this situation goes, oh,
I can see just the immediate frustrations of not being able to communicate how you feel about it or know yet how you feel about it.
I can see more vividly how you could get yourself into this as a crystalline state of after major.
Global turmoil. Where you want to go back? Yes, I feel really strongly.
It goes back to your question about does the place just you we need to go backwards or forwards.
I know it's right that we need to go forward. And I've always been a kind of an optimist, but I feel that tug than there will be.
There's another layer of grief required of you if you are going to put behind you who you were before the event was out of your control.
That's so interesting, isn't it? Whether. Yeah. Whether grief is some some grief is for the past and some grief is for the future, isn't it?
And I think a lot of us are in that position now in different ways.
We are group grieving for the future that somehow seems very uncertain or isn't isn't unfolding, isn't unfolding as well as we thought.
And yeah, it is great to have Shakespeare there.
So I taught Shakespeare there with us. Shall we see what, um, what the wider community wants to contribute to the discussion?
Let's see. Let's see. Was it. Can you come back in and help us with any of the questions?
I can indeed. Thank you both. This is really interesting, the last.
15 minutes questions have been flooding through and actually in some kind of uncanny way,
you've been answering some of them already around questions like, well, what is plague writing?
What is it? What aspects either of this particular play or Shakespeare's writing more broadly come out of his own experience of the plague,
of being in isolation, of being in lockdown in various different ways or else the whole question.
I mean, the very it seems to me there's a rich theme run through the discussion and through the questions, actually, about.
OK. Did we learn in terms of the past? Are we learning stuff for the future here?
And maybe one particular question that we can start with is, Erica,
you talked about a moment at which when the characters leave you to explain who is, as you said it, desiccated.
He hasn't designed anything for a while. He doesn't really know how to feel anymore, doesn't know how to connect with other people anymore.
And that led them to your discussion between the two of you about, in a sense,
how we might risk being in that space through this long lockdown period.
We might unlearn various ways of connecting with others.
And I don't. I wondered if either of you had anything to say about that, because that that that kind of question has come up a number of times.
Yes, really. It's a really tough one, it's a brilliant question. And in a way, that's all we're talking about in the face at the moment.
But. What is what is the sort of essence of that discussion is will is theatre when you can't have a big congregation?
And of course, it's story, but it is more than that.
There are so many forms of receiving story. And I, I none of us have simple solutions yet to how we might have socially distanced theatre.
But I think the feel of a collective need to share experiences.
I mean, it still feels like terrible cliches, but it's never felt so true.
Vivid actually, to be in some sense sharing space, even if that is digitally in our emotional reaction and relationship.
Feels like it's got to. We've got to fight for that. If we enter a period in our lives where that connexion is much, much reduced from what?
From what we've known. Yeah. Also, as I was saying before, that sends I think the place suggests that.
You do have to look beyond what you've known to some new pleasures, new joys.
It's interesting you say pleasure because one person asks, there's all this stuff online.
Now, that's not much an explosion of Shakespeare online. How do we negotiate between, on the one hand,
the full time job of keeping up with all these productions and then sort of step back, take pleasure in it?
I mean, Emma, you're right about taking pleasure in reading Shakespeare as well.
I wondered if if the sort of a sense if there isn't too much on the line and that actually
this is a chance to read stuff to and to rediscover a kind of Shakespeare who is read.
Yeah. I mean, I feel contradictorily about this is completely wonderful that there are these productions made available ones that I for me,
ones that I've seen before, ones that I would never have seen, on the other hand.
I am spending a lot of my working life online.
The idea that at the end of that working day, I would sit down and online, I would watch, you know, three and a half.
Quite challenging hours of of Shakespearean theatre. Even to me that that feels as sort of a particular kind of kind of pleasure.
And I think there is something to be said for a kind of analogue Shakespeare in these times,
which is to get away from let's get away from the screen and to look to just have the different kind of physical engagement with that.
That's about prints on it on a page. I mean, Shakespeare's readers didn't.
I mean, they didn't read, I didn't think for the plot. They didn't read from start to finish, which we shouldn't feel that we have to do that either.
They can zone in on you know, you could have a look at the the bear or at, you know, the very final scene of A Winter's Tale.
That'll be a lovely thing just to read on the page. It doesn't need to be partners of everything else.
I mean, I, I think there are wonderful kinds of opportunities of lockdown.
But we are often creatures who, you know, make lists and kind of obligations for ourselves, don't we?
And, you know, if it becomes a chore.
You know, it's it that's not really that's not really working. But on the other hand, it's a wonderful yes, it's a wonderful opportunity.
One of the other things that's resonated with a number of people that you mentioned was the Erica right at the beginning.
You talked about the sort of. The increasing absence of truth at the beginning of the play.
Now, you didn't say fake news and maybe you don't want to draw too immediate a parallel precisely because you haven't read the play kind of now.
But a bigger question there might be whether this sort of dissembling of truth amounts to a critique of religion, of power, of tyranny, of gender.
I mean, how do you polls that? I think it does all those things.
And actually, the reason I set it in the 50s was because I think that might reveal those things more vividly.
That's what I meant by reducing it.
You know, it isn't it isn't about one of them and it isn't about one politician in our lives, which can be the inference.
It's it's rather, I think, about assumptions about the things you've listed, in particular what masculine power looks like when it's invested in you.
And when it's invested in you by God or the gods. And we were influenced or I was influenced by a book I really admire by Cape Man called Down Girl,
which attempts a new formulation of misogyny that although it's a quite sort of excoriating account of misogynistic behaviour,
actually, I find it strangely compassionate book because it it tries to guess out what it is to think you're
entitled to a certain status in life and what goes wrong when that status is not fulfilled.
And that is, I think, what happened sort of inside Lyons's to some degree is invested with this power.
And yet somehow there are still these competing forces.
And I I think that the way he abuses his power is to get back to a sort of primal sense that surely he doesn't need to consult in that way.
That really made us laugh. And Rasselas, but also really fruitful as an idea that you've got.
He's actually very brilliant man around him. So.
So Shakespeare also doesn't present, you know, completely complicit man.
He presents a real range of voices trying to get him to listen and remarking in deeds that that truth has collapsed.
And he will he will be laughed at for that. And yet they can't stop him.
And I think there is something I mean, you know, much remarked upon that the person who gets closest is Paul Minor.
So in a way, she's onto the gendered nature of knots of that insecurity.
And I think when she accuses him of tyranny. She's going to his heart.
He's saying, I know you. I know this isn't who you are. But you are capable of being collegiate and consultative.
Indeed, maybe democratic and having a notion of objectivity. But you're insisting on ignoring all of that by yourself in your court.
So I could. God, I absolutely do. That's what I said.
Does it dismantles all of that. And then on top of that dismantles the notion that religion will protect you.
Religion will offer you a moral compass, but it won't protect you from yourself.
Which seat seems to be radical both then and now? And would you want to add to that?
I'm just I'm just processing what what what I said. I mean, that's a fabulously expansive view of the plays.
And I mean, it takes the play out of the kind of familial context. And I think I think that is a very contemporary way of hearing the word tyranny
that's that's attached to the parties and hearing the kind of politics, the real political force behind that.
And, you know, I'm reminding them that these are kings in another context.
I mean, you yourself have talked about the privatisation. In other words, what looks like a kind of family story.
Yeah, it's actually also very much a national bigger politics.
I think we've gone through a period of of of maybe domesticating Shakespeare's plays and saying this is a family.
You know, King Lear is a dad.
And, you know, this is what's sort of important about about these relationships, because we think that's a way we can we can relate to it.
You know, Hamlet student and all of those things. I mean, you know, Hamlet Prince of Denmark, you know, the play is called King Lear, not Lear.
Lay on aunties and public scenes are kings. You know, these are these are political figures whose.
In some ways, his political views as sort of emotional relationships or family relationships may be metaphors for that for the government,
rather than psychically compelling portraits of a family like, you know, like someone else's family.
That seems a really important thing to think about. About Winter's Tale, which I feel has some very, very important kind of ethical component.
But I think sometimes it's sentimentalised and made into a kind of fantasy or kind of rose tinted sort of play, particularly in conclusion.
That's been revelator to me, too, to just hear what what what I am saying.
Another thing that comes up in relation to the whole truth question is another strand that ran through your discussion,
which was madness, both madness within the specific play.
But also one person very straightforwardly asks, why is madness such a recurring theme across Shakespeare's work?
I don't know which one of you wants to address. I have finished. Good question.
I mean, that's a great question, isn't it? And I was thinking as you were talking, Erica, you said you glossed Magnus's mental illness.
And sometimes I think Shakespeares madness. What we call madness in Shakespeare is susceptible to a different kind of vocabulary
which will now use about mental distress or mental disease in some way at other times,
I think it's just not susceptible to that. And I think madness is a much more theatrical device.
It's one of the ways I feel as if Shakespeare has different.
I actually think through through Shakespeare has different ways of showing what's going on inside.
And we have tended to prioritise soliloquy, the kind of speech, big speech on your own as the main vehicle for exploring the interior.
But I think that's only one of a number of kind of attempts Shakespeare make.
Sometimes there's a kind of dialogue or a split personality almost between two characters.
I think he does that bit with Othello and Jago. In some ways that feels sometimes more like an interior dialogue.
And I think I think madness, the depiction of madness is another way of saying here's what's beneath the surface,
or here's what this person can't articulate themselves. And they are.
That's an understanding, which is partly about a human or psychic.
But it's it seems deeply theatrical to me because it's about how you show something,
which is the thing that, you know, theatre people now and then are really looking for.
How do you demonstrate this rather than just describe it? I'd only add to that I think one of the filch currencies is multiplicity.
So I think in the later plays and not just Winter's Tale,
she gets really interested in the idea that a certain kind of sadness or a certain
kind of aloneness is about not being able to embrace all the parts of yourself.
And for me and in The Winter's Tale, Autolycus bursting on the sort of bonkers, almost just implausible way.
What I love about it is that she he is is really comfortable, uncomfortable in front of an audience.
Being 16 people at once, that's all fine and moving in a line line to line between different tones and different personalities.
And I suppose I think there's an.
Well, I absolutely agree that sometimes he uses it as a means of communication, almost a way, a way of saying what you need to say.
And sometimes it's nearer to the unease or disease or pain that what's in common
across those two ideas is that we are many things in many in every in every moment.
And that Sanyasi, in a way, is is knowing and living that.
And he sees, I think, a sanyasi in the actor. That often, I think, in your country, culture gets lost.
It's not pretending to be somebody else.
It's being in touch with a multiplicity of characters and character traits that live in some sense in yourself.
Otherwise, you're not leading. We're moving now on to questions performance.
We'll come back to domestic and political questions a minute.
But to two people in particular have a sort of performance related questions that connected to what we talked about already.
I think one is talking about implausible and madness and outlandish things.
It's a question for Erica, really. What is the most outlandish setting you've considered staging one of Shakespeare's plays?
In a way, you sort of set yourself a mad world.
To put things in order. No, no, I haven't.
And it's really it's interesting that question, because I'm I've quite enjoyed some outlandish settings in my time,
but never really drawn to them, I think, because I'm really interested in the kind of rooted.
A psychological, truthful or something that's going on in these deeply implausible, often implausible plots.
That's something we recognise. So recognition is really driven me.
I mean, I like the Romeo and Juliet. I did two years ago.
I was very, very ordinary sassing, which was right now, but felt really felt really daring somehow, even though it's been done before.
Because of the expectation of romance. So to set it up in a in a in a cityscape, that's got the kind of brutality.
And it's, you know, it's a rude space in a way, a space in place of vulgarity and of honesty and violence.
Weirdly, still did feel quite shocking to some.
And who outlandish to me sometimes don't do properly outlandish should I should experiment.
There's a wonderful cartoon that question and I enjoyed by Tom Gold, who giu oldy, who does cartoons for The Guardian Review and The New Scientist.
And he's got a cartoon which is called The Knight Shakespeare Production Generator.
And down one side, down one column that is kind of mad settings and members.
The next column is a mad costuming and then a mad sauce, you know, in the style of Rodgers and Hammerstein or something.
At the end is a great it's a really great cartoon that, again, you're answering people's questions.
Even before I asked them. One person asked about the relationship between, let's say,
ballet productions or musical productions or film productions of Shakespeare and stage productions and the degree to which,
you know, you have them in mind as a producer or indeed as a scholar, as part of your your kind of work on what Shakespeare's about.
We'd like to do that. We've only got about eight minutes left. So unless you want to particularly address the other general question,
I like to return to the question of of silence because a quite a few questions about violence.
Erica, you mentioned the fact that at the end of the play. They do not speak to each other or if they're not given.
Now, again, you can sort of polls that in two different ways. And actually two different questions have done that.
One has said, what do you make of the fact that she never she barely speaks in the final scene and says nothing to her brutal husband,
in a sense, doesn't call him out. And the other one says her silence over spoken so loudly.
I wonder where either of you think silence leaves us at the end of this play?
I think there's hope. I mean, I don't think there's ease.
I don't think there's any going back. As I said, I think there's hope in that silence because he's silent, too.
I think that's really powerful for me. I think he, in some sense, is not her brutal husband anymore.
I don't think that means he's guilt free or or or without trauma.
And I have no idea whether she can love him. But Shakespeare suggests that he is sufficiently changed to to experience her again.
And that's that's the opens. It opens the door. And she she's very clear.
I mean, she doesn't say very much due to the obvious.
But once see, once she can speak, she's very clear that she has preserved herself for her daughter.
She remains the mother of his child. And actually, I find that also rather contemporary reading, if you like.
You know, we can we know this now. You can't have a child of someone.
And then in some sense fundamentally split up from them.
You can divorce them and not live with them. But you are in a family forever.
And I that's how I read the ending. Am I supposed to read the silence?
Was this could this particular silence stay liberalise or they exemplify a kind of
a sort of intrinsic openness that the plays I think have at all kinds of moments.
And so I suppose one of the differences about reading or kind of reading as opposed to performance is that.
It might be easier not to not to fill the silence or not to us not to interpret it.
It might be easier to leave it as as a kind of as an absence or as a or as a silence or a boulder as potential for lots of different kinds of endings.
I mean, I do think that the reason one of the reasons Shakespeare's plays have been so perennial is because these hardwired
ambiguities allow us to come back to them again and and see them do them differently or resolve them differently.
It's interesting, though, that what you're talking again and again,
it's another question that's come up, it's about sense, the difference between reading and watching.
And we've we've addressed that before.
But I suppose it's again, it's a question that somebody else about the rehearsal process when you're in rehearsal.
Do you think of yourselves as sort of translating a reading experience into something else,
or is it altogether different as a kind of physical process?
What's the relationship between what one reads?
And it's the page to stage question, but it's also kind of the intimacy of reading and the collective bodily experience of being in the show.
Can Erika draw have anything to say about that? Yeah, it's a really great question.
I mean, I think we often imagine in rehearsals that we're doing a kind of collective reading.
We're reading to understand with one another with different different lenses.
And when you were playing and we were playing in the room. But I'm that's very rewarding because there are so many clues, you know,
you find stage directions where you didn't think they were there and you find clues in the in the in the iambic,
even though you might not be being very obedient to it. Somehow there's a new meaning revealed by close reading.
But at the same time, where what am I saying becomes very vivid is when you get stuck on actually in these rehearsals, I got stuck.
More fundamentally than I had done for a few years. There was a there was a famous afternoon was meant to do about five scenes and I couldn't do it.
I couldn't get out of four outfoxing three because, look,
you've got lots of brilliant people in that scene saying very little and trying to understand it.
One line they do say, and how it relates to everybody else. And we could we just couldn't do it.
We had so many conflicting views of what it might mean and therefore how we should approach it.
And we gave up I gave up in a social scene and tried to be really vulnerable and say, well, we just don't.
Let's just decision. Next time we came back to that scene, we ran it together with, I think, the whole play.
And it happened in a way that was very satisfying, probably never to be recreated again.
But fingers crossed because we accepted that all questions are individual questions were questions without answers.
And when it was only sort of when those questions were the streams crossed, the magic occurred.
So we couldn't get our heads around Camilla. Camilla and Paulina. And when it happened, it was what all of us wanted to happen.
We just wanted that to happen without text.
So I'm I'm really fundamentally agreeing there is something that goes beyond reading and then comes back to the ambiguity and happiness of reading.
If you trust in that act of reading together and don't try and resolve it, or we often say, you know,
we mustn't inadvertently try and write an essay and explain the essay, that's for another space.
This is about trusting that it doesn't entirely make sense and that you want to take us towards our conclusion.
JEBB More thoughts on on what Erika just said.
I was thinking about something that you said right at the beginning, I had lots of thoughts about that, but I just never used it.
Lots of some news at the beginning about about plague,
literature and literature of plague and thinking about something I read by the brilliant assessed Adam Gopnik.
And he was talking about coming as the plague and saying, we've had decades of saying this is a book.
This is this is a metaphor. Plague is a metaphor. And in reading this literature, metaphorically.
And now, you know, we're coming back to me literally. And I suppose that doesn't mean that, you know, it's Shakespeare.
It's in some ways they are, you know, a different way round.
It's somehow, you know, the I don't know, the kind of the metaphors are actually about the plague or something.
There's something slightly different about about what the relation between what's going on and what Shakespeare actually writes.
So that's something that's been ticking over in my mind, as you've been asking. That's some of the some of the other questions.
That's very interesting. But again, one questions just come in saying thanks for all that.
Well, thanks for the great talk. They nearly all start with that. I'm very curious about the buyer.
Should it retain its beastly material quality or should it be priced primarily transfigured as a metaphore into the passionate space of the play?
It seems to me we've been talking about exactly that all the way through. Absolutely brilliant.
One way or the other. Yes. And I think where we're officially at the end of our time,
one other person has suggested that perhaps as a sign off, we can all do it as if pursued by a bear.
I don't know if you you particularly want to do that, but I have been pursued by a WASP for quite a lot of the time.
So I'm sorry if there's a lot of buzzing on my part of the.
We haven't noticed at all. I think I I've got a few more ways to say in a second, but I'm very, very.
I think some of the discussion about Venus and Adonis was also really great.
And I love the idea, Emma, that you've offered us that Venus will be back at some stage in all of this.
So I'm afraid I need to bring things to a close now,
but I can't do so without giving enormous thanks to our two brilliant speakers for giving us a wonderful,
generous and thought provoking session this evening.
It's clear it's been clear from the question, the online discussion and actually the interaction that you haven't seen.
But I can see from the nuts and bolts back backstage, as it were,
the interaction between the online discussion on the questions as it emerged that Erica and Emma have exemplified how research and practise can cross,
fertilise and compliment each other and all sorts of sometimes unexpected ways.
So a big thank you to to our viewers at home for watching and for your comments and questions.
But as I say, our primary thanks go to both you and Erica.
Thank you for your time and for your generosity.
Everyone else, and because you two are welcome to please join us for next week's Big Tent Big Ideas Live event on Thursday,
30th of April at five p.m. with Professor Abby Williams, who will be part of our reading week theme.
Abby will be discussing the social life of books, a history of reading together at home with readings and a workshop.
We hope you'll be able to join us again. Them.
Thank you once more to Emma and Erica, you've given your time, your thoughts, your questions and your engagement as we came together online.
This series would not be possible without the support also from many other people, including the torch team and, of course, our audience.
We seem to have taken Emma and Erica away, but I'm sure they would thank us for joining in here today.
So thank you, everyone, and goodbye.