They're revered, taught, emulated and endlessly produced. But do plays like Twelfth Night and Much Ado actally produce laughs any more?
I’m sure the question has flitted through the mind of most people sitting through a performance of a Shakespeare comedy at sometime in their life – whether as reluctant participant in a school trip, matinee-going theatre stalwart or despairing director. Is this stuff actually any good?
There’s no argument about Shakespeare’s tragedies. They’re powerful, loud, rather archaic, spoken in ritualised language which makes for good speeches, and about people doing extraordinarily vile things to each other, usually for the sake of power or love. All that fits perfectly with our gut feeling as to what tragedy should be.
But do the comedies work as comedies? In many performances of Shakespeare comedies, the laughs tend to be a little forced – either dry chuckles at a piece of word-play we’ve had explained to us by an Arden edition, or relieved guffaws at the kind of man-falling-over-a-dog slapstick which we would scorn if it appeared in Frasier or Family Guy. Is there possibly a problem here – that in taking the plays too serious as Shakespeare, we stop ourselves responding to them instinctively as comedies?
There are ways round this in production. Crazy Shakespeare, done at high speed, with ludicrous props like baguettes, skate-boards and rubber chickens, can usually get the audience in a good mood, if only for the sheer irreverence and the stupidity of anyone trying to do iambic pentameter in a chest wig and flares. Romantic Shakespeare (such as Trevor Nunn’s film of Twelfth Night) plays it thoughtfully, bringing out the slight melancholy in the works, rather than chasing laughs which might have been there in the late 1500s, but can’t be recovered. Rom-com Shakespeare slots the Bard into a framework we’re comfortable with (such as Kenneth Branagh’s Much Ado About Nothing, with its surprisingly high quota of skin) and leaves us feeling warm and fuzzy rather than hilarious.
Whatever the truth might be, it’s surely a question audiences and actor have to ask, if we’re ever to enjoy these plays in the way they were intended.
