Humming Along to Shakespeare
Time and change go hand in hand, with the former dictating the way in which the latter is shaped. Re-enactments and adaptations of classical works are particularly good examples of this, each new version incorporating aspects of modern culture. It is only natural for the timeless work of Shakespeare, then, to be the perfect platform for these sorts of additions - a sort of theatrical experiment waiting for an ambitious director to come by and toss in some ingredients for the perfect brew.
Yet the one thing I've noticed in all of the Shakespeare productions I've seen is the deliberate lack of music. There is a continued desire, it seems, to maintain theatre as the home of white noise, a place where music doesn’t enter unless through the lens of the Hollywood camera and the big screen. More emphasis is placed on the instantaneous, disruptive realm of sound -making music the neglected child, the one that sits in the corner, wrapped in its skirts of elegance, awaiting its chance to be escorted into the limelight for its solo dance.
Music is one of the things I look for in any production, hoping the work creates an atmosphere that engulfs and transports me somewhere far away from the present moment. It’s the reason why I love movies like the recent The Great Gatsby adaptation — despite the slightly questionable acting of Leonardo DiCaprio, the soundtrack sold me on the movie. I was able to transport myself into the skins of both Gatsby and Daisy, to feel a mixture of biting fear and longing. It’s difficult to feel the same way with Shakespeare’s plays - though again, it’s the 2014 adaptation of Romeo & Juliet with Douglas Booth and Hailee Steinfeld that I consider to be the best, all due to the beautiful soundtrack. There are days when I find myself still trapped in an emotional bubble that the song “Juliet’s Dream”, from that soundtrack, creates: releasing involuntary associations of marble and twisting vines, glass goblets gently clinking together, the way breath catches only when a person has seen something truly mesmerising. The success of the soundtrack’s composer Abel Korzeniowski shone through when I felt I’d give everything to be transported to the scene of the Capulet ball and experience the supposed "sin" the two lovers indulge in. I longed for this emotion to find its way onto the bigger stage, to feel whisked away and lost in limbo with the actors.
And so, it was on a particularly hot summer day a few weeks back that my disappointment was finally quenched, and I was able to witness the most unexpected way in which music found its way into a Shakespeare play.
Summer in Toronto is known to be quite eventful, both for first-time tourists and locals like myself who still haven’t seen all the joys the city has to offer. One such delight is the annual Shakespeare in High Park, put on by the Canadian Stage theatre company. Each summer, contemporary adaptations of two of Shakespeare’s plays, a drama and a comedy, are shown in what is, quite frankly, the middle of the forest. Though I volunteered for the company a couple of years ago, I had never seen one of the plays - but persistence is a virtue, and with careful planning and pre-purchased tickets, I was finally able to see All’s Well That Ends Well, the comedy of this year’s repertoire.
Being warned the plays were contemporary was one thing, but nothing could’ve prepared me for the sensorial delight that I witnessed, facilitated by an element which, as mentioned earlier, has been lacking from Shakespeare’s plays for a while: music.
All’s Well That Ends Well is a play about loving someone who does not love you back, about finding ways to cleverly work with this apparent obstacle rather than around it, to use it as a battlefield for wit. It reaches back into the centuries-old topic of female cleverness and the power of beauty over men, topics which today would certainly not be approached in the same way. The traditional aspects may have remained the same, but they were not the focal point of my attention. Rather, it was the informal, contemporary monologues that exist partially to fill up the time between scene changes, when the audience is held captive by a female character who isn’t in the original version of the play. She acts as the all-knowing oracle in these moments, despite the fact that her formal role in the play is to be the comic relief Clown who is frequently insulted by the Countess. It is she who nurtures an ambient, dream-like state from the very beginning.
Imagine: you are sitting and looking down at a stage on which a funeral reception has been presented. Out comes the cast of characters followed by her, the unnamed woman, who, under pale magenta and purple light, begins her monologue. You love, she loudly proclaims; you love and you lose, you love and you fight, you love and you suffer. Yet her words, regardless of how witty and bittersweet they were, wouldn’t strike the heart as much as they did if it weren’t for the musical accompaniment, a mixture of dream pop and ambient music that envelops you. Think of a slightly softer Lana Del Rey vibe and a Halsey aesthetic — this is the kind of production that greeted me, instantly grabbing my attention and holding it until the very end.
It’s still hard for me to pick out words that to describe the experience, which is why I associate the memory more with colours — muted magentas and violets with occasional bursts of blue. They were tangible colours, going from a sweet bubbly flavour to something deep and bitter, like an extra dry wine I hadn't acquired the taste for. What I knew for certain was that I was looking at myself on stage in the form of that woman. Those simple monologues contained words I desperately needed to hear a couple of years ago, and hearing them now after fighting the obstacles myself felt they only reaffirmed what I had already realized. They were a welcome medication I didn’t ask for, nor knew that I needed.
These monologues were sprinkled throughout, but it is somewhere near the end of the second act that the woman sings one simple line, like a perfectly timed pebble being dropped into a pond, creating tiny ripples that lull with their calm confidence: nothing’s gonna hurt you, baby, she promises, speaking as if to an invisible lover sitting just beyond the crowd, reachable only by the power of her voice. A few times she adds a more lines after it, but it is this first one that stays in the mind, which she repeats over and over. It becomes a prayer and a curse, a reassurance and a taunt. It reached down somewhere deep into me and combined images and sensations that I still cannot put into words.
Despite the fact that the comedies are usually positioned as the more family-friendly of the two plays, there was little of that here, considering the storyline included the heroine tricking her husband into getting her pregnant in order to keep him from leaving. Watching it with my partner added a whole other layer to that which I never would’ve considered, or experienced, before. As I watched the way Bertram is seduced by a young Italian girl, there was a touch of the personal that lay in the way her hips sashayed before him. It served as a reminder of the power of the partnership between music and the female body, not only to cast a spell on others but also to find an inner rhythm.
"Wonderful" is a rather mundane to fully capture the experience, but that it was. On a technical level, the additional contemporary details were superbly integrated, and the actors felt like they were truly living their roles, not merely acting for two hours. What I remember most, though, is the music: the way in which it made the scene where Bertram dances on a table in Italy come alive in delicate swirls in my mind, transcending the emotional plane. I felt lost in the way techno bled together and copulated with ambience to create something new, a wild child that knew of its power to captivate. It made Shakespeare seem like a mix between party and melancholy, a vibe that as a young adult is still very much at the core of my existence, though not in such a restless form as it inhabited during my teenage years. The music made Shakespeare transform into a dream-like world down here on earth. For once, it made me feel as if I was one of those condemned lovers in his plays - reaching for my loved one into the abyss, uncaring caring whether or not I’ll come back out of it.