Shake it up

Hamlet, another Hamlet, Macbeth, comedy Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth again: as ever, you can barely turn a page of the Fringe programme without thumbing past another slab of Shakespeare. This year alone, you'll find an all-female, Amazonian Julius Caesar, a hip-hop Midsummer Night's Dream, a comic Othello, an Ophelia solo show, a vaudevillian Hamlet, Bardic bingo, Shakespeare for Breakfast, Shakespeare for Schools and a bonkers-looking sketch show called Shakespeare’s Monkeys.

“All the fun of the fair!” surmises Fringe favourite Tim Crouch, who returns to Edinburgh following last year’s baby-abusing, audience cross-examining The Author. This year, he brings part four in his series of Shakespeare-skewering one-man shows for young audiences, each told from the point of view of a bit-part character previously dashed to the margins. Having tackled Midsummer Night’s Dream (I, Peaseblossom), The Tempest (I, Caliban) and Macbeth (I, Banquo), he’s now turning his attentions to the densely-plotted, multi-stranded Twelfth Night and its bullied, put-upon, puritanical steward Malvolio.

“In some ways, I, Malvolio is a young person’s version of The Author – it looks at the amount of pleasure taken in cruelty to others. In Twelfth Night, there is great delight taken at Malvolio’s misfortune, and so he places the idea of Toby Belch [his tormentor-in-chief] into the audience and provokes laughter at his own expense. Where do our ethics lie when we watch it? How responsible are we? I’ve always felt the unfinished story of Malvolio very strongly. I often imagined him leaving the stage and picking up a semi-automatic and going back and killing everyone. So this is an opportunity to explore his reply.

“There’s a key moment when Malvolio enlists the audience to help him hang himself – and it’s a children’s show! The response is different each time: there has been some consternation, and I’m quick to console, and some kids are really up for it. But ultimately, it’s a funny show, it is a clown show, the contract is clear and established very early on.”

Prior to unfurling I, Malvolio, Crouch has been at Shakespeare HQ (Stratford) directing an abridged version of the notoriously prickly Taming of the Shrew, again for families and young audiences. Clearly, he’s got form. “This week I’ve seen The Merchant of Venice and Macbeth, one Rupert Goold [director] re-set in latter day Las Vegas, one Michael Boyd set in a traditional, almost Jacobean setting. The material is extraordinary, and the material will not diminish in its extraordinariness. Theatre rests in the moment of exchange between the audience and the performer. I always come back to: what is happening between us in this room? I don’t have an issue with the material – it’s what you do with it. If people walked out of Rupert Goold’s show saying ‘that’s not Shakespeare’ then that’s a desperately depressing thing to say.”

Elsewhere at the Fringe, a perceptible buzz is a-brewing around a certain Alec Baldwin’s sort-of appearance in transatlantic company Fundamental Theater Project’s Hamlet 3D: A Lost Generation. Owing to other filming commitments, Baldwin's not actually appearing in the flesh but he is being beamed in via projected video for the role of Hamlet’s murdered father, the ghost. More than mere practicality, the three dimensional element is important, says artistic director Sam Underwood, because it shows “Hamlet keyed in to today’s world, so he uses 3D technology. Without making ‘Hamlet meets Avatar’, having a visual element was another way of engaging the audience and making them feel like a part of the journey. The way we've staged the company within the space and around Hamlet also portrays a sense of a 360-degree attack, a constant compression of Hamlet that drives him forward in his mission.”

Underwood, who also lured Anthony Rapp (who headed up the cast in the original Broadway production of RENT) and 30 Rock’s Scott Adsit into the rotating, role-swapping cast, has cut the epic masterwork down to a brisk 100 minutes for Edinburgh (“Sacrilege? You have no idea…”) and it may shrink further still. “Well, traditional is not the first word that pops into my head. We decided to use Hamlet’s story as a way to represent the struggle facing today’s 'Lost Generation’, the obstacles and corruption they come up against and the responsibility they have to take charge of their destiny by taking action.

"When does this feeling of misgiving and perplexity leave society? And who are the ones that are responsible for making that change? We are. Hamlet is. It is a call to arms. Defying augury. That's the beauty of using Hamlet – you don't have to force it or shoe-horn ideas into the play because it’s already brimming. We are still using purely Shakespearean text and by combining this with a multimedia backdrop, we hope to bring the audience on Hamlet's journey in a much fuller, sensory way.”

Commenting on the feast of Shakespeare at the Fringe, Underwood adds, “to know that, as well as fresh new works being crafted, people are still paying homage to the literary legacy laid before us is thrilling. There is room for many visions. Not everyone is going to love everything, but that is what art is all about. I feel that there must be an absolute awareness and understanding of the musicality of [Shakespeare’s] text, and as long as that’s there, an actor can use that and let the gut take hold. Do I think his work is open for constant reinvention? Absolutely. What better source material to use? Shakespeare did the same thing with his plays.”

“There is always something new to find,” adds Alexandra Spencer-Jones, company director of Action To The Word, who are behind the visceral Titus Andronicus. “It’s a testament to him that his work is constantly reworked and reinterpreted. Last year in London alone there were eleven productions of Macbeth, not one of them similar – all of them drawing in the crowds. Now that’s something isn’t it? Five hundred years on, I should imagine Shakespeare would be dancing around Holy Trinity churchyard at the thought."

“Titus Andronicus, our production, is Shakespeare’s horror. It’s a total cavalcade of hate and slaughter. It’s not traditional at all and we’ve bought it right up to date with a banging soundtrack. The text is so violent and the acts that the characters perform on each other are atrocious. It’s laced with sex, violence, pain, nudity and all things nasty – so it's not for the little ’uns!

“A lot of people hear Shakespeare’s verse and cower in fear. It too often proves a boundary for actors and audiences. So many people have told me that as children they sat bored stiff in English class not understanding a word, considering it ‘too posh’ or ‘too hard’. Shakespeare was the people’s writer of his time – if he were writing today, no doubt it would be for television and the masses. There is a reason the plays have survived. He has a talent for cutting a cross-section into humankind, portraying all aspects of life. It’s as if he lived everywhere and had friends from all classes, backgrounds and cultures.

Shakespeare starts and ends my day, he’s the man in my life. I don’t believe that any group of people taking on a Shakespeare text could become a futile exercise. One will always, always gather something from the experience.”