Originally a comment by iknklast at Miscellany Room.
Well, it happened again. We didn’t walk out at intermission this time, but it was still difficult to watch yet another Shakespearean play being “queered”. I didn’t mind the same sex romance; it might not have been strictly Shakespearean, but it wasn’t offensive, either. The ‘transing’ wasn’t as obvious this time. The actors couldn’t act – they were either overacting or just saying their lines so fast you couldn’t catch them (unfortunately, the fool was one of those, so any humor in the lines was lost in ethereal nothingness).
The worst, though, was the pre-show explanation of the celebration of the non-binary in Shakespeare. They seemed to think his cross-dressing characters were taking up his stance for trans-rights (privileges, as we know).
The thing they never got is that Shakespeare understood the binary. He knew there were two separate sexes. He knew what roles were expected of each sex, and he knew that the altering of the roles could be used to create both dramatic situations and comedy. He used that to great effect. When the director and actors fail to understand that, and take the gender-bending, cross-dressing seriously, as a statement meant to speak to our contemporary delusions – excuse me, ‘knowledge’ – then all comedy is lost.
It wasn’t just the characters rushing lines, or shouting in overacting, or simply phoning it in that made it lose so much of the comedy, though of course that played a role. It was the fact that the actors didn’t understand that Shakespeare, fully aware of male and female, was using a biological reality to create a comical situation where things were not quite as one would expect, and characters set up situations that they believe to be in their best interests but often backfire on them with highly amusing results.
And I will never, ever forgive the actor who didn’t do a good job delivering the Seven Ages of Man monologue. That is totally unforgivable, and if there was a god, I am sure she would receive eternal punishment for such a transgression.
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