61. Hank Rogerson’s Shakespeare Behind Bars [The Tempest] (2005)

In 1950’s The Liberal Imagination, Lionel Trilling made an extended version of the argument that the liberal arts (including the experience of literature) help extend the imaginative powers of the human condition, which is necessary if society was going to thrive. This theory seems to be supported by scientific studies that suggest that the reading of literature makes people more empathetic. While this finding supports a comforting narrative that literary study is ennobling, there is significant doubt as to whether reading causes empathy to grow, or whether empaths are more likely to find their way to literature so that their reading habits correlates to their emotional outlook.

One of the reasons I resisted Shakespeare for a long time is the presumption that I should have been reading Shakespeare (because doing so would be good for me). Furthermore, the simplistic notion that Shakespeare’s stories are redemptive and that reading Shakespeare makes one good seems to overlook characters such as the bastard in King John, Iago in Othello, Aaron in Titus Andronicus, and half the characters in King Fucking Lear. Smarter is not always an ethical improvement.

I am not suggesting that Shakespeare is culturally or ethically neutral or bad—merely challenging a binary approach to the social worth of the bard.

These are some of the things that came to mind when watching this 93-minute documentary about a prison troupe called Shakespeare Behind Bars as they prepare for a performance of The Tempest.

The setting is Luther Luckett Correctional Facility, a medium security prison in Kentucky. The film is produced by the BBC and Sundance, and features Appalachian mood music by James Wesley Semple. Imagine a smart reality television show with the gravitas of Ken Burns’s The Civil War.

What seems to strange in watching this documentary is how gentle it seems. The six prisoners we follow are guilty of heinous crimes, and with one exception they seem lucidly aware of the seriousness of their crimes. The subject of why they are in prison is not shirked.

Curt Tofte, the civilian volunteer director of the SBB ­program, holds these men to a high standard of understanding the psychology of these plays, and understanding how those psychologies have been in play in their own lives (though not in terms of their crimes, which he does not judge since, being in prison, they have already been formally judged). The conversations they have together about their parts, and their personal histories before prison, plus their confessional testimonials in which they discuss their crimes explicitly, reveal that these prisoners are human beings who can articulate their struggles to build a meaningful sense of selves and lives in prison.

For example, there is Sammie, who is shown delivering Henry V’s rousing Agincourt speech. Tofte taunts Sammie’s performance as a pointlessly cerebral exercise until Sammie found the urgency in the speech, after which he could find the emotional meaning of the speech.

Sammie, running lines in the yard.

Sammie is a large man, and he was bullied by his parents and sexually abused as a child. He killed his emotionally abusive girlfriend one night after she triggered him. I am deeply suspicious of the idea of acting or art as therapy, but Sammie’s ability to comprehend Shakespeare as solidly as a professional actor does imbue him with a significant emotional vocabulary.

I presume Tofte’s years of experience had built enough trust for that taunting to be positive—what he was taunting Sammie for was not being emotionally present enough in the speech.

Sammie is a successful computer programmer, and has a potentially bright future outside of prison if he is released, but he knows that his success in prison might be difficult to match as a free man, too.

In this Tempest, he plays Trinculo, the alcoholic butler who would usurp the place of the king.

Big G as Caliban, Sammie as Trinculo.

Big G is another intriguing example. In his testimonial, he explains how the prison system mentors criminals to make them into more adept criminals, but that if one is lucky, a better set of mentors can be found, like Tofte and Shakespeare. He is cast by the group as Caliban, the monster of the Island who feels like his inheritance has been denied him. Big G killed an officer in a shoot-out when he was a drug dealer in his early twenties. He explains that he initially thought that criminals should make good actors because criminals have to be good liars—but his experience as an actor showed him that good acting is far more about the truth than lying. Identifying the Caliban in himself requires depths of self-perception, and humility. (Oscar Wilde noted, in his preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, that some readers dislike Realism because of the ugliness of the realization that we are Caliban.)

Hal as Prospero.

Hal, an older member of the group, is cast as Prospero, a man wrestling between a sense of rage and a desire for redemption.

Hal killed his wife. Hal shows himself to be incredibly sensitive, and reveals the crux of the questions I offered in the beginning of this review:

It’s taken me a long time to figure things out and to come to an understanding of who I am and why I did some of the things that I’ve done. It’s helped me to forgive myself, but some forgiveness doesn’t seem to be—to be—enough. It’s kind of—it’s kind of—it’s kind of hollow. I try to find deeper meaning—in my life and—this can’t be it. This can’t be what my life is all about, and what my actions have caused.

I am omitting several other stories because Shakespeare Behind Bars is too good to overshare before you’ve seen it. This documentary is better than most productions of The Tempest.

Shakespeare Behind Bars does not offer a definitive answer to the question of if these men are sufficiently reformed, if they can maintain their gentleness, vulnerability, and aspirational nobility in the outside world. The honesty, intelligence, and vulnerability of these men in trying to answer that question themselves is an honor to behold.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

60. Michael Elliott’s King Lear (1983)

As I suggested when I reviewed Kurosawa’s Ran, King Lear is an epic fucking bummer. It begins with a heartbreak that destroys a family, and then the plot degenerates until the very notion of integrity and decency and nobility, along with a kingdom, is destroyed.

The essence of the horror of Lear is expressed by Edgar, the son of an earl who assumes many disguises when his half-brother frames him for treason: “And worse I may be yet. The worst is not / So long as we can say ‘This is the worst.’” (IV, 1).

The characters in Lear never stop talking about their worsening, dreadful fates.

Despite the presence of a clown, who will eventually be hung, offstage, this is not one of those tragedies leavened with comedy. At least it doesn’t feel that way. It’s like Game of Thrones without the wit of Tyrion Lannister or the dragons or the sex.

Hamlet is somewhat likeable, as is Othello, so we can root for them despite knowing how tragedies end. But the folly of King Lear, who decides to retire as king and divest his power between his daughters in a ceremony in which he invites them to out-boast one another in their love for him, feels like too big a burden to bear as viewers. Normally, at least.

Laurence Olivier, in his final performance of Shakespearean work, is another matter

It took me about 15 years of being a Shakespeare junky to appreciate Olivier. At first, he seemed like the epitome of the unhip, pre-method actor who seemed little more than a vocal instrument. As a result, I don’t worship Olivier, nor do I worship the idea of Olivier (some purist notion of Shakespearean presentation). When I praise him, I do so without nostalgia or sentimentality or Anglo-philia. Generally speaking, he is a bold interpreter of Shakespeare.

Olivier successfully threads the needle of this difficult part: he persuades us that he has been a strong king, but one who is not Machiavellian enough to foresee how the Machiavels in his own family might undo him. He can remind us of a grandparent of advanced age who is emotionally unprepared to deal with the sturm und drang of the world he lives in. The dialectical emotions involved—pride, anger, shame, sorrow—can simultaneously appear in a single line of Lear’s, as delivered by Olivier. And in terms of his gestures, Olivier enacts Lear’s sense of melodrama when his self-image will be denied by his daughters. We see a strong man grow weaker and madder throughout the play.

In the opening scene, Olivier wears a crown so large that it seems commensurate with his grandiose ego. Tanya Moiseiwitsch seemed to have too much fun with that choice.

Michael Elliott’s film was made for television, but we shouldn’t hold that against him.

One of the oddities of this production is the sparse set, which is only one or two notches above minimalist. There is a Stonehenge for the more fateful scenes, and some castle exteriors and a few medieval interiors and one silk-flower forest that may have previously appeared on The Muppet Show. But the lighting is very dark, so that a black background gives the largest color impression on the viewer, and that certainly fits the mood of the story. Because the set is mostly not there, the cheapness of the set seems of little importance (unlike the elaborate, yet unpersuasive sets of [the BBC versions]). Sometimes Shakespeare’s language is quite well-served by placing the work in an abstract imaginary space, as indeed was the case on the Elizabethan stage.

Dorothy Tutin as Goneril and Dianna Rigg as Regan.

The other actors of this production are also excellent, including the divine Dianna Rigg as Regan, and Leo McKern (Bugenhagen from The Omen!) as Gloucester.

John Hurt plays the fool, but this is not a memorable performance, but that may be because the part is so disappointing. Feste, in Twelfth Night, now there’s a fool!

The yang to Lear’s ying is Cordelia, and Anna Calder-Marshall accomplishes with Cordelia what Olivier accomplishes with Lear.

Her Cordelia can foresee the doom that will follow her inability to express her sublime love for her father, and especially to have it counted alongside the purely rhetorical expressions of her older sisters. There is a certain loopy innocence to her performance that makes the performance complexly layered and makes this difficult character rather likeable.

Lear is not an easy play to watch because it is not an easy play to like, unless you are into S&M without the sex or cool clothes, but Michael Elliott’s version of the play makes such a dire spectacle about as enjoyable and entertaining as can be and offers some unforgettable performances.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

58. Julie Taymor’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2014)

Dear readers,

I have reached the point where my experience as a reviewer is becoming a liability. It is the responsibility of every production of Shakespeare’s work to both make it new while simultaneously tapping into the essence of what makes Shakespearean drama work. The more films and plays I have seen, the more difficult I am to impress. How do you make it new, yet old, after people have been making it new for so long?

Not long ago, I review Julie Tamor’s Tempest, which was mostly lackluster if compared with Prospero’s Books or especially if compared with Taymor’s own Titus. Nonetheless, I have looked forward to seeing the film of Taymor’s stage adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, since the preview for it seemed darker and stranger than her Tempest despite the generally lighter source material. I longed to know if Taymor’s tepid Tempest was anomalous. Could she make Dream both new and old?

Yes, she could. Her Midsummer Night’s Dream is too delightful.

The constraint of the stage seemed to help immensely. How does one convey the sense of metaphysical wonder of fairies in three-dimensional space? Taymor’s solution was to work vertically to convey the sense of worlds passing through worlds.

A clownish-looking fellow who will turn out to be our Puck goes to bed in the middle of the stage. Branches lift that bed high above the stage, and construction workers, our rude mechanicals, attach ropes and chains to the corners of the bed, and chainsaw the bed from its rustic frame. The sheet is yanked diaphanously across the entire stage, making Puck disappear before the arrival of the Duke and the nattering of our love triangle.

While there are natural and pagan elements in this Dream, Taymor uses the fun of a stage production to avoid (mostly) the predictable color green. Es Devlin’s stage design and Constance Hoffman’s costume design is mostly a gothic palette emphasizing black, white, and gray that seems to make all of the aerial work seem all the more ethereal.  The grass-covered barcalounger is a nice touch. Even Titania’s fairy attendants are dressed like ghostly Victorian orphans.

There are no movie stars in this production, just actors doing mostly perfect work.

Max Casella gives let’s an old-fashioned New York Italian accent do most of his work as Bottom before his transformation. He doesn’t overdo Bottom’s overacting, which is a relief.

One of the great scenes we expect is of course Bottom as an ass, and in this case, leaning on Taymor’s earlier theatrical instincts to involve puppetry, Bottom’s jackass puss is rendered through a prosthetic head that tapers to an alarmingly human mouth.

Tina Benko as Titiana and David Harewood as Oberon prove quite regal and compelling.

There is the usual inter-gender wrestling performed charmingly.

Jake Horowitz was underwhelming as Lysander, but that is a minor part, and since he kind of looks like Russell Brand but isn’t Russell Brand, we must count ourselves lucky.

Puck, who isn’t a minor part, is daringly performed by Kathryn Hunter, who makes it look easy.

Taymor’s minimalism and eclectic style work wonders on this film of her stage version. The cinematography somehow managed to convey a cinematic sense without getting in the way of the performance. This is a superior Dream!

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.

56. David Jones’s The Merry Wives of Windsor (1982)

My sweet readers, I broken a promise in watching a BBC Complete Shakespeare film. I well know that fine actors were unable to rescue such productions, but I was tempted by my desire to see more Falstaff, and in particular my desire to see the great Richard Griffiths play him in this Merry Wives. This made-for-TV version from 1982 is much, much better than the other Complete BBC versions I have seen. Unfortunately, that does not make it even good.

The usual problems with these productions abound. First, the haste of the productions and the closeness of the sets made two-shot scenes difficult. I suppose seeing people’s faces in Shakespeare could be construed as overrated. Second, these Renaissance sets of Merry Wives look fake, like those of the second season of Black Adder if someone forgot to make it funny. Oh, yes, Merry Wives is supposed to be a comedy. And third, something about the pacing of the production seems like maple syrup in zero gravity.

Let us talk of Master Ford, as portrayed by Ben Kingsley in the same year as Gandhi and one year before playing a steel-nerved cuckold in a film adaptation of Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. Kingsley has interpreted his part as melodrama—a man, like Othello, who did not know jealousy until it completely overwhelmed his character. His soliloquies are delivered directly to the camera, and his performance is magnetic.

Judy Davis plays Mistress Ford, and though she is not often on camera, she plays the part with an effervescence that somehow seems both Elizabethan and modern.

Nigel Terry, who some may know as Arthur from Excalibur, makes the most out of hyperactive Pistol, making him seem intelligent and infinitely mischievous.

I suppose I owe you a summary of the plot. Two wives of Windsor are being wooed by the fat rascal, Sir John Falstaff, whose knighthood is of dubious origin. The wives decide to punish him for his impudence, for his assault on their marriages and honor, hence their merriment.

Richard Griffiths apparently decided that the comedy of this comedy didn’t commence until halfway through the movie, when this illicit wooing begins. I suppose the idea was to establish Sir John’s nobility more than his charisma at the outset.

The thing tends to drag. Time wears, as it were. The running time is just under three hours. On the whole, this Merry Wives does draw out the tensions of Shakespearean comedy, for the difference between comedy and tragedy is sometimes only how the story ends: marriage, or a pile of corpses?

The legend is that Merry Wives was Shakespeare’s response to Queen Elizabeth’s demand that he write a play about Falstaff in love. There is a lot of love in this odd play, even if Falstaff isn’t one of the true lovers. I am not sure if someone not already familiar with the play could easily follow this version. It isn’t quite good, but overall it isn’t bad, either.

The tricky finale actually works.

John King (Episode, well, all of them) holds a PhD in English from Purdue University, and an MFA from New York University. He has reviewed performances for Shakespeare Bulletin.