by Dikran Tulaine

Created on: October 30, 2010   Last Updated: November 01, 2010

I have played a lot of Shakespeare.  And in playing it one should understand what one is saying.  There are millions of schools of thought on how to speak it.  As if some magic formula would make it clear.  And if the vote on thisquestion were reversed and people were maybe less intimidated by "kulture" and agreed no, I would have to agree with them.  As played on stage it often is incomprehensible.  Often by famous people in famous productions.  Cultures need for pretence almost outstrips its need for truth.  And the grandly incomprehensible is easier than the quietly truthful. 

A long time ago I saw a Kabuki performance at the Lincoln Center.  It was astonishing.  I was a kid in my late teens.  Next day in New York Times very sage journalist said: 'you may not have understood it but it was beautiful.'  I was stunned.  It's an understandable comment at this remove, I suppose, but it introduces a poisonous idea into  culture.  The beauty, surely, is in the understanding.  Not in the emperor's clothes but in the comprehensible story he might tell..  The Kabuki in classical Japanese song was totally clear.  Was I young and accessible?  Particularly gifted? Lucky? I just think they were very good.   A certain famous English actor,  bellowing the lines of Macbeth in that awful strangulated  voice so fashionable today and loved by critics, in the colorless standard English accent invented by the BBC in the 1930s, is clear as mud. 

Perhaps it is reassuring to the people who can afford Broadway tix to attend to the unfelt artificiality of Anglo high art  but that is not an experience of 'the play.'  Last year a famous English young man played Hamlet clearly and beautifully in New York and was dismissed for being a movie star, and the 'worthy' pros around him were pointed up as 'how it should be done.'  And the sixteen year old girls filling the stalls was presented as proof of how bad said young man was at his part.  I shut my eyes a moment and listened.  Claudius, player King and Gertrude could all have been someone else. Hamlet, and some other unknowns round him leapt with life and clarity and understanding. So to the point.  It is comprehensible but there are no shortcuts.  And then it is lovely.

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