Time for Shakespeare

It seems to be obligatory to set Shakespeare’s plays in some period other than Shakespeare’s own. I don’t object to this strategy; it’s been going on for decades if not centuries. But I do occasionally find the results of juxtaposing the playwright’s poetic 16th-century cadences with modern settings curious, though often curiously compelling.

Recently the Indiana University production of Richard III set the action in the ambience of competing motorcycle gangs. (One thinks immediately of West Side Story, the Leonard Bernstein musical that retells Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet through rival street gangs.) In this case the choice seemed cued by some analytical remarks by author Josephine Tey, helpfully included in the program notes:

For thirty years, over this green uncrowded land, the Wars of the Roses had been fought. But it had been more of a blood feud than a war. A Montague and Capulet affair; of no great concern to the average Englishman…. It was a small concentrated war; almost a private party.

Biker leathers with clan emblems and embroidered roses—now universally called Tudor roses—fit the notion of internecine strife, white rose versus red rose. A modernist and timely touch was the addition of “fact-checking,” a nod to the current presidential election season in which the usual political falsities are revealed by various fact-checking organizations. In this instance a television screen flashed periodic historical corrections that played against Shakespeare’s Tudor-slanted take on events. Shakespeare’s histories, in particular those of times and figures most immediate to his own era, were propagandistic, designed to conform to the views of Elizabeth I, who, like her father Henry VIII, was not a monarch to be crossed without mortal peril.

All in all, I found the biker motif added rather than detracted from the essence of the play. The darkness worked for this dark, brutal, bloody drama in a way similar, but in stark contrast, to the IU production of The Taming of the Shrew this past July. That staging set Shakespeare’s boisterous romantic comedy in a South Beach, Florida, sort of place, which also worked well: a light-hearted play set in a light-filled locale.