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A Lifetime with Shakespeare: Notes from an American Director of All 38 Plays
Written by the only American to direct and fight--choreograph all of Shakespeare's plays, this text represents an expert and practical guide to the Bard's oeuvre. From the Henry VI plays through The Tempest, each play is explored in its full theatrical complexity, with particular attention paid to directorial and acting challenges, character quirks and development, and the particularities of Shakespearean language. Directing successes are recounted, but the failures are not shied away from, making this work indispensable for anyone interested in producing plays by Shakespeare.
253 pages, Unknown Binding
First published September 9, 2010
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March 23, 2019
The very brief chapter about Comedy of Errors exemplifies my feelings about this book. The play is an audience-favorite which it is popular to denigrate among professional actors and directors. Barry openly disdains it. He complains that much of the comic dialogue in it doesn’t work for a modern audience, but he also insists many times throughout the book that Shakespeare plays should never be cut. So his production of it contained a comedy routine scene that “bombed” every time, because the audience didn’t get it. He blames the play. Not himself. Not his choice to include a scene that wasn’t working, rather than focusing on making the play the tightest, best comedy it could be. It was more important to adhere to his rigid stricture against editing Shakespeare’s plays.
Barry also notes elsewhere in the book that we have no idea what Shakespeare’s plays were like when they were performed in the playwright’s day. We only have the works as published, some of them with dramatically divergent texts between the Quartos and Folios, etc. So why does he insist that the plays should always be performed uncut? We owe it to Shakespeare. It’s more important to honor the presumed interests of a dead playwright than to give the audience the best possible experience of the play. I can’t agree with that philosophy. But it squares with a lot of Shakespeare I’ve seen produced at the professional level. The practitioners are very pleased with themselves, and very comforted by their sense of superiority, but the play is actually keeping its distance and telling the audience what they ought to appreciate, rather than reaching out to them and bringing them along organically.
Here’s the other thing about Comedy of Errors. Barry doesn’t trust the intelligence of his theatregoing audience. He explains that the joke of mistaken identities won’t work if there isn’t a total suspension of disbelief. The twins must look identical. But he also acknowledges that the audience ought to know who is who at all times, so they can follow the plot. And so he can’t figure out how to make the most important gag in the play work. Because he can’t have it both ways. How about giving the audience credit: they can handle the cognitive dissonance of being told that two people are identical in the eyes of the other characters on the stage, even though they can see that they actually look different. Audiences have been dealing with this at least since The Brothers Menaechmi was written around the 2nd century BCE. They get the joke. They’ll go along.
Last, the book is full of directing proscriptions and imperatives. That’s how they’re phrased. Not as suggestions or options. As a director myself, I find few of them helpful. I certainly wouldn’t recommend the book as a resource to anyone who has directing experience, though I could see it being mildly helpful in an undergrad elective directing class.
Every once in a while Barry offers a good anecdote from his many years of working on Shakespeare, or quotes the insights of another Shakespearean, and those are the parts of the book I enjoy the most. He also does a pretty good job of identifying the pitfalls and trouble-spots in the majority of the plays. But I would take all of his solutions with a grain of salt. They might allow me to produce a fair approximation of a play as directed by Paul Barry. But I think even he would appreciate that that’s not the point of being a director. You have to create the show that is right for your company, your audience, your ensemble, your designers, your moment in time.
Barry also notes elsewhere in the book that we have no idea what Shakespeare’s plays were like when they were performed in the playwright’s day. We only have the works as published, some of them with dramatically divergent texts between the Quartos and Folios, etc. So why does he insist that the plays should always be performed uncut? We owe it to Shakespeare. It’s more important to honor the presumed interests of a dead playwright than to give the audience the best possible experience of the play. I can’t agree with that philosophy. But it squares with a lot of Shakespeare I’ve seen produced at the professional level. The practitioners are very pleased with themselves, and very comforted by their sense of superiority, but the play is actually keeping its distance and telling the audience what they ought to appreciate, rather than reaching out to them and bringing them along organically.
Here’s the other thing about Comedy of Errors. Barry doesn’t trust the intelligence of his theatregoing audience. He explains that the joke of mistaken identities won’t work if there isn’t a total suspension of disbelief. The twins must look identical. But he also acknowledges that the audience ought to know who is who at all times, so they can follow the plot. And so he can’t figure out how to make the most important gag in the play work. Because he can’t have it both ways. How about giving the audience credit: they can handle the cognitive dissonance of being told that two people are identical in the eyes of the other characters on the stage, even though they can see that they actually look different. Audiences have been dealing with this at least since The Brothers Menaechmi was written around the 2nd century BCE. They get the joke. They’ll go along.
Last, the book is full of directing proscriptions and imperatives. That’s how they’re phrased. Not as suggestions or options. As a director myself, I find few of them helpful. I certainly wouldn’t recommend the book as a resource to anyone who has directing experience, though I could see it being mildly helpful in an undergrad elective directing class.
Every once in a while Barry offers a good anecdote from his many years of working on Shakespeare, or quotes the insights of another Shakespearean, and those are the parts of the book I enjoy the most. He also does a pretty good job of identifying the pitfalls and trouble-spots in the majority of the plays. But I would take all of his solutions with a grain of salt. They might allow me to produce a fair approximation of a play as directed by Paul Barry. But I think even he would appreciate that that’s not the point of being a director. You have to create the show that is right for your company, your audience, your ensemble, your designers, your moment in time.
Displaying 1 of 1 review