January Meme: Shakespeare adaptions or retellings I want

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