Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

154 Chapter 6 The Director
John Tiffany and Andrew Goldberg were the codirectors of
this extraordinary Macbeth, originally staged by the National
Theatre of Scotland and then on Broadway in 2013, with Alan
Cumming playing all the important roles—including Lady
Macbeth and the witches. The directors set the play in a
psychiatric ward, with Cummings assuming the character of a
patient reliving Shakespeare’s original. © Handout/Getty Images
In director Karen Henkel’s radically revised and multi-lingual version of
Shakespeare’s Macbeth at the Munich Kammerspiele in 2011, Banquo and
Macbeth intentionally bloody each other in order to appear as war heroes
when they rejoin their company. Banquo (with the microphone, played by actor
Benny Claessens) here sings of his woes while Macbeth (played by actress
Jana Schulz) bashes him with his (or her!) staff. Such severe reconceptualizing
of classical works can be controversial: many in the Munich audience
attending the production’s opening night performance booed loudly during
the curtain call. © Silke Rössner
in London and Los Angeles in the 1970s and 1980s with
his drastically revised version of Shakespeare’s The
Taming of the Shrew. Paring the title to simply Shrew,
Marowitz deleted two-thirds of the text, added a few
scenes of his own, and winnowed Shakespeare’s cast to
merely five characters—Kate, the strong-willed “shrew”
of the title, and four men, who not only taunt and domesticate
her, as in Shakespeare’s original, but brutally terrorize
and finally anally rape her—driving her insane in
the process.
By retitling the play, Marowitz warned the audience in
advance that they would be seeing a reimagined version
of Shakespeare’s work, but more recent directors, particularly
in Europe, don’t always bother changing the titles.
Karen Henkel’s 2011 Macbeth, at the Munich Kammerspiele
in Germany, featured a handful of characters who
spoke only a tiny fraction of Shakespeare’s actual text.
In Henkel’s modern-dress production, the witches sing
“Rock-a-bye-Baby” (in English) to start the show, after
which Macbeth (played by a woman) gives TV interviews
that reference the killing of innocent Afghanis by a “kill
team” of American soldiers. But they didn’t change the
title. Neither did anyone for Phyllida Lloyd’s production
of Julius Caesar, which arrived in New York in 2013,
and was set in a women’s prison—and as such had an
all-woman cast. Neither did directors John Tiffany and
Andrew Goldberg, whose Macbeth played on Broadway
in 2013 with Alan Cumming playing 15 roles in Shakespeare’s
tragedy, which was set in a mental institution
with his face presented in close-up by three video monitors.
The actors in Elizabeth LaCompte’s 2007 Hamlet
with The Wooster Group in New York delivered a good
deal of the Shakespearean text, but were almost wholly
in synchronization (and often in competition) with a
1964 filmed version with Richard Burton, which was
projected onto the stage behind them and showed intermittent
interjections of cheap porn movies, Hawaiian
hula dancing, and jerky kabuki movements. Obviously,
today’s directors have an absolutely gigantic sweep of
potential adaptations and conceptions that they may create
while staging even a classic play.
Nor are classic plays the only ones being overhauled
today. The great 1935 American folk opera Porgy and
Bess, retitled The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess (after its
composer and lyricist, George and Ira Gershwin) was substantially
revised by its adapter (Suzan Lori-Parks) and
director (Diane Paulus) for its 2012 Broadway premiere.
And in Germany, Tennessee Williams’s 1947 A Streetcar
Named Desire was, with the permission of the playwright’s
estate, radically adapted by both directors Frank
Castorf (in Berlin, 2004) and Sebastian Nübling (Munich,
2011) with added and deleted scenes that led to astonishing