First Take Your Bard
Return to the Forbidden Planet by Bob Carlton
Birmingham Hippodrome, 1996
There’s no doubt about it, people have their favourites when it comes to Shakespeare. That’s why there have been dozens of screen versions of Hamlet and none of Pericles; any number of Othellos (musical, opera, films, puppet show) but not a single Timon of Athens rescued from the obscurity of the straight stage and given to a wider audience in a more palatable setting.
Why is this? Why are some plays seen as ripe for plunder while others slumber mouldily in the text books, overlooked and unloved? It must be something to do with the stories themselves, the plots that strike a chord well beyond their immediate meaning.
Take Return to the Forbidden Planet, which is a rock ’n’ roll version of a fifties sci-fi film which in turn was derived from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. This is believed to be among the playwright’s final works, his farewell to the stage before he retired to enjoy the rich rewards of his lifetime’s achievement. Some say they can hear the author’s voice in Prospero’s mouth when he talks about drowning his book of magic and describing “this insubstantial pageant [life? fame?] faded”. But this is to deny that Shakespeare was writing a part for an actor to perform, and what that character had to say was not necessarily what was on the playwright’s mind at the time. Besides, Shakespeare is also thought to have had at least a hand in Henry VIII after this date, during a performance of which the old Globe Theatre, the famous wooden O itself, was burnt to the ground. And that’s another one you don’t see every day. Maybe managements are as superstitiously fearful of it as they traditionally are of the Scottish play.
And speaking of Macbeth, for all the hex on it over the years it is still one of the most frequently repeated (and reworked) plays in the Shakespearean canon. Verdi used the text as the libretto for an opera, Orson Welles made a cheap and misguided rush-job version in the forties, with décor apparently from ancient China and a weird five-pointed star scratched on his hairy chest. In the fifties another film, Joe MacBeth, turned the character into a gangster with Ruth Roman talking her vacillating husband Paul Douglas into bumping off a rival hood. (It just goes to show how useful a classical education can be. If only Duncan had read Shakespeare’s play, he might not have been so keen to accept the hospitality of a couple calling themselves Joe and Lily MacBeth.) And then of course there was the legendary Japanese version Throne of Blood directed by Akira Kurosawa (who else?) starring Toshiro Mifune (ditto) as the blood-soaked medieval warlord.
But perhaps the most accessible of all the Macbeth films is Roman Polanski’s 1971 version. Filmed in Wales in constant rain and fog, it has a high degree of realism including Francesca Annis’s nude sleepwalking scene. Po-faced critics at the time suggested this was more down to the finances being put up by Playboy Enterprises than to historical authenticity, though the script had been completed even before Playboy got involved. The actress herself was rightly annoyed that so much fuss was made over this one scene, complaining that commentators made it sound as if she played the part undraped throughout, like a centrefold.
Generally speaking, the most popular plays are done so often that the only reason to put any of them on these days is because somebody has got a new take on the text which is meant to say something about the times we live in, or reflect something in the modern psyche. Polanski’s ultra-violent Macbeth was his first production since the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate by Charles Manson’s Family, so maybe he had a few personal demons of his own to exorcise at the time. Twenty-five years on, the latest Richard III starring Ian McKellen is a radical updating of the 15th-century king’s story into the era of fascism and jackboots. Where Shakespeare had his armies slogging it out in the mud of Bosworth Field, the new movie shows tanks bursting through walls. The whole deal looks, as someone sourly pointed out, like a bad night at Berchtesgaden, which was probably the intention.
One can’t help feeling, however, that the 16th-century dialogue sits rather uncomfortably with the 20th -century backdrop. Laurence Olivier had anticipated this very problem with his own wartime version of Henry V, and resolved it by setting the opening scenes on a stage during an Elizabethan performance of the play, so that when the obviously fake backdrop of the theatre gives way to the less obviously fake fields of France, the audience are attuned to the elevated language and so more prepared to accept the new version of reality they are being offered. Of course, it being wartime they couldn’t film Agincourt at Agincourt – instead it was a field in Ireland and all the extras were local farm hands, but the illusion worked.
Where Olivier cheated was by having the Battle of Agincourt played out in brilliant sunshine. The historical battle was a grim and grisly affair fought in a bog after a downpour, and this is precisely what Kenneth Branagh filmed in his more recent take on the same story. With a more modern, cynical and detached attitude he could see the soldiers of both sides for what they must have been – miserable, frightened men with nothing but their guts and their loyalty to their respective crowns to sustain them. There was no glory to be had, just the desperate struggle for land and power that might or might not have been legitimate. In the age of the Falklands, Kuwait and Middle East conflicts, this was a message that was worth reiterating. And how clever of Shakespeare to have provided a text that could be used both as a wartime morale-booster and a modern-day critique of armed conflict!
Often an adaptation will be made for no better reason than there happens to be a star hot enough at the time to bring in the crowds no matter what they’re performing in. Why else would Franco Zeffirelli have chosen to direct old Mad Max himself Mel Gibson in Hamlet? The rest of the cast surrounding him had almost all played the title role themselves at some point in their careers, yet here they were reduced to the ranks in such roles as Rosencrantz and Horatio. No disrespect to Mel, he did a creditable job. But the box office was the only reason he was called upon to do the job at all.
Of course, Zeffirelli had nothing to prove and is still one of the most visually exciting directors of Shakespeare, as his earlier versions of the Bard’s works testify. The Taming of the Shrew in 1967 was put together mainly as a showcase for the explosive and rumbustious pairing (both on screen and off) of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, but Romeo and Juliet the following year proved to be one of the most successful transitions to the screen of any of the canon, mainly through its straightforward telling of the tale, the gorgeous costumes and settings, and the casting of a pair of attractive and engaging teenaged unknowns in the leads – Leonard Whiting was seventeen and Olivia Hussey two years younger. It isn’t their fault the film has since lost some of its power to move due to the fact that Nino Rota’s beautiful love theme was later hijacked by Simon Bates to use as background music to his syrupy Our Tune slot on Radio One.
As far as music goes, the Bard has given composers of every stamp plenty of scope, from Bernstein and Sondheim’s West Side Story (based on Romeo and Juliet) to the black musical Catch My Soul (based on Othello), from Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate (The Taming of the Shrew), through The Boys from Syracuse (A Comedy of Errors), to any number of operas derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (– half a dozen at least: Purcell wrote The Fairy-Queen in 1692, Garrick staged The Fairies in 1755, incorporating twenty-seven songs by various hands, Weber wrote Oberon in 1826, and this century both Britten and Carl Orff have tackled the subject. Mendelssohn composed one of his most delicious suites of incidental music based on the play before he was eighteen, and in 1939 there was even a jazz version featuring the Benny Goodman Sextet and trumpeter Louis Armstrong as Bottom).
It just goes to show that the better a work is, the more variations you can play on its theme, and the more ways you can offer it up to each new generation. In the case of Return to the Forbidden Planet we are presented with a 17th-century original, transmuted into a 1950s film, updated in the eighties and restaged so as to incorporate popular hits of the fifties and sixties. It is a conundrum convoluted enough to have appealed to the supple mind of the Bard himself. What he would have made of the final result, however, is something we’ll never know. But if there’s one thing all these various adaptations over the years has made clear, it’s this – if you’re going to steal, you might as well steal from the best.