January Meme: Shakespeare adaptions or retellings I want

[selenak]

likeadeuce asked my about Shakespeare adaptions or retellings (a la „10 Things I hate about you“ for The Taming of the Shrew“ for example) I want.

First, the problem is that retellers and adapters whose takes I end up loving have a more audacious imagination than I do. If you’d asked me whether I want a High School AU version of a Shakespeare play, I’d have said no, and yet, „10 things I hate about you“ managed to superbly keep what works about „Taming of the Shrew“ and chuck out the horrid dated gender stuff. I wouldn’t have suggested a Tempest production set in the Arctic, and yet, when the RSC did just this, starring Patrick Stewart as Prospero, it turned out into my favourite Tempest of all times. Yet another Midsummer Night’s Dream, this one with bonus fascism? God no, and yet, when watching RTD’s adaption, again, I loved it.

Speaking of my favourite living Welsh writer, though: given how his ruthless cutting and redistributing of lines complete with new pairings and unexpected revolution paired with our Rusty’s penchant of mixing comedy and darkness made his take on Dream so fascinating, though, I’d like to see him have a go at Twelfth Night. I’m counting on canon on screen/stage same sex relationships at the very least, and maybe different end games, but I’m also curious how he’ll handle Malvolio. And Feste. And which setting he’ll choose.

In terms of retellings: I felt somewhat let down by the BBC’s Hollow Crown take on the York tetralogy. Now granted, the Henry VI plays simply aren’t Our Will at his best yet but in the try out stage, but still, there’s far more potential than what we got on screen. Now, Ian McKellen and Richard Linklater already did the „Richard III in Alt! 1930s Britain“ thing, and what I have in mind is more a transposition into another culture. How about taking a hint from Kurosawa instead, hiring a Japanese team and do the York plays retold with Samurais? (Perhaps this time keeping pissed off peasant Jack Cade?) Or settle them in the post-Genghis Khan era of Mongol history, when the various branches of the Borjin Clan had a go at each other for supremacy? (For occupied France, read China.) And I would like it to be a retelling rather than something still using the Shakespearean names, completely told as a Japanese or Mongol story, respectively.

Lastly: did you know that young Richard Wagner, before discovering Norse mythology, Schopenhauer and German nationalism, composed an opera adaption of Measure for Measure which turned this late, cynical Shakespeare play into something that culminates in the people staging an uprising against anti-sex laws, gets rid of the Duke/Isabella conclusion (Isabella still doesn’t get to stay a nun, though, she ends up with Lucio instead) and transports the whole action from Vienna to Sicily? It made me wonder what an adaption into another medium could do with that play. And whether you could somehow make sense of the Duke in a modern context, and make the endings – Isabella who really didn’t want to marry hitched to a man she hardly knows, Angelo who was ready to rape and kill pardoned into marriage with Mariana – palpable and plausible? I’m tentatively eying a vlog AU a la The Lizzie Bennet Diaries set in the movie industry, with the Duke and Angelo as producers.

The Other Days

Comments

[sovay]

Or settle them in the post-Genghis Khan era of Mongol history, when the various branches of the Borjin Clan had a go at each other for supremacy? (For occupied France, read China.)

Have you seen Prince of the Himalayas (2007)?

[selenak]

Nope, but it sounds just like my kind of thing!

[legionseagle]

We did Measure for Measure for 'A' level back in 1980, and even then our teacher (one of a handful of male teachers in an all-girls school) was highly apologetic about the gender politics, and describing stagings at Cambridge in his student days (dunno quite when they were, but EM Forster was still alive, if frail, and tottered into college occasionally) which superimposed fix-it endings.

I saw both the stage version and screen version of McKellen's Richard III and thought they were both magnificent, and 'got' the politics in a way that few have managed until the Martin Freeman Richard III which I think deserves a lot more plaudits than I've ever seen given to it. My post about it here .

But I side-eyed Rusty's Dream, for the reasons set out here - tl:dr version, it's all very well saying you're making a point about colonialism, slavery and oppression but if your visual symbol of it is one of the play's main female characters stripped of her lines and literally bound and gagged throughout, there's mixed messages going on.

But one of the things RTD's dream did remind me of were an engagingly bonkers troupe of outdoor (mainly) Shakespearean performers who were convinced that Shakespeare was really sending coding messages about the Old Religion (and no, I don't mean Catholicism) through the medium of his plays, and cast them accordingly (which is why one of the characters in Dissipation and Despair ended up called Innogen; this lot thought it was most important to spell the character more usually called Imogen that way, for Old Religion significance.

[likeadeuce]

These are great suggestions. . .a #MeToo 'Measure for Measure', goodness gracious.
Because film producers can have the kind of arbitrary power that royalty used to with nothing like accountability. Maybe it's a 'family friendly' studio that sets strict guidelines for the behavior of its stars and employees but lets the CEO get away with whatever he wants. And maybe the Duke has in mind to share the narrative of what happens while he's away, hence the behind the scenes machinations. Isabella would be the ingenue who's serious about saving herself for Jesus.

[selenak]

Yes, precisely. Maybe Claudio is a scriptwriter who has an affair with a hopeful starlet. Since he's not a producer or star actor, only a writer, he's going to be thrown to the public by the studio as a gesture as a sexual molester despite the fact his girlfriend is actually really into him, but otoh, as Isabella points out in their climactic scene, he did have a higher position in the hierarchy than his later girlfriend who wanted to star in the hit movie he was writing the script for. And then Claudio asks his sister to sleep with Angelo who has the power to make it all go away and return his job...

[kore]

Oh hell yeah. Weinstein was King of his world.

[kore]

Lastly: did you know that young Richard Wagner, before discovering Norse mythology, Schopenhauer and German nationalism, composed an opera adaption of Measure for Measure which turned this late, cynical Shakespeare play into something that culminates in the people staging an uprising against anti-sex laws, gets rid of the Duke/Isabella conclusion (Isabella still doesn’t get to stay a nun, though, she ends up with Lucio instead) and transports the whole action from Vienna to Sicily?

WHA

Boy, that was a mind-blowing thing I did not know. Wow!

[selenak]

:) He. They never play anything earlier than Flying Dutchman at Bayreuth, and even at the height of the Wagner cult in Germany, the earliest opera of his that got staged was Rienzi, but he did write far more, especially when young, needing to impress and needing the cash. Das Liebesverbot was a flop at its first production (not least because the cast hated each other) and thus he never tried to restage it in his life time, but it's "Yay sex!" attitude is already very Wagnerian. It's available on CD.

[espresso_addict]

I still like Taming as Conservative party RPF. I've sat through an unabridged version of that play in the theatre taken entirely straight, and I was very tempted to walk out.

Have you seen the gender-switched Malvolio one? (I haven't but it sounds wonderful.)

[selenak]

No, I only heard about it as well, but I find the concept most intriguing!

[dhampyresa]

a High School AU version of a Shakespeare play
Have you seen She's The Man (2006)? It's this for Twelfth Night.

[selenak]

No, I haven't. Is it a good one?

[dhampyresa]

I remember enjoying it and finding it funny when I watched it.