| Visual Journey Across Decades and Continents |
Theatre Event |
| Shooting Shakespeare- Photography Exhibition , WMC , April 7, 2014 |
Errol Morris, acclaimed documentary-maker of, among others, Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld, has an absorbtion in photographs. It is in part a condition of childhood surgery-induced weakness in his eye and in part the loss of his father at the age of two. “Photographs put his image in front of me, but they also acutely reminded me of his absence.” It is the consolation of theatre that its passing is implicit in its making, with just the interval between that may be indeterminate. But images remain in its wake and in the case of the Victoria and Albert’s Department of Performance the number is in excess of two million. The WMC houses the smallest of selections, forty-four on its first-floor wall, fifty-two on the floor above. It is nonetheless an epic span across the globe and through the centuries to photography’s founding age. The oldest image is that of Charles Kean as Henry V. Its date, 1859, belongs to an era when the young art is still struggling to emancipate itself from painterly influence. It is a handful of years before Julia Margaret Cameron is to set up her first tripod. The small plate looks as it has been hand-treated after its development. Theatre’s stars unroll over the decades. Henry Irving is at the Lyceum in 1892, his Cardinal Wolsey suitably Machiavellian in appearance. The unknown photographer of Herbert Beerbohm Tree in 1899 has given his King John a melodramatic treatment. Sarah Bernhardt as Hamlet dates from the same year. Donald Wolfit as Lear in 1942 has a strangely stagey look to modern eyes. A fascinating contemporary picture shows two dozen schoolboys in striped caps standing in and around Chipping Campden’s medieval Wool Exchange. Nancy Hewins is playing Falstaff for Osiris Theatre Company, Britain’s first all-women professional company. A sample of the pictures selected shows today’s leads in their youthful roles. Derek Jacobi is a Touchstone from 1967 in a production that is pure nineteen-sixties in style. Timothy West plays Holofernes in 1972 with a mischievous twinkle to his eye. Albert Finney is a Hamlet in action wielding a sword. Helen Mirren is a sad-eyed 1976 Queen Margaret with Alan Howard as a Henry VI buckling under the burden of majesty. Ian McKellen is a near-naked blood-soaked Coriolanus from the National Theatre in 1984. Some of the pictures are formally posed. Angus McBean has captured Vivien Leigh and Olivier in 1951 as Cleopatra and Mark Anthony. Catherine Hepburn is depicted as a yearningly romantic Rosalind. Angus McBean is photographer too for Richard Burton standing alongside Claire Bloom as Virgilia and Fay Compton as Volumnia. By contrast there is many a dynamic image. Oliver Ford Davies is a Lear at the Almeida standing in a storm with real thick rain. John Haynes has captured a thrilling moment in “As you like it” with a vaulting central figure amid a shower of falling leaves. This last company is the Marjanishvili Theatre of Tbilisi and the exhibition brings together productions from a score of countries in as many languages. The exhibition depicts Shakespeare from Vilnius, Minsk, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Mumbai, Kabul, Istanbul. The world’s newest country, South Sudan, is represented. The styles are diverse, the masked figures from a Kyoto “Coriolanus” particularly challenging and unsettling. My favourite: a Henry VI from Bitola and performed in Macedonian. A red-dressed figure stands before background courtiers in loose t-shirts and sports trousers. The figure in the centre screeches, those behind are indifferent. Marc Brenner’s image is one of true drama. “Shooting Shakespeare” continues until 8th June. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
This review has been read 2648 times There are 25 other reviews of productions with this title in our database:
|
