17 - 23 May 2001
Issue No.534
|
Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 17 - 23 May 2001 Issue No.534 |
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Current issue | Previous issue | Site map | ||
Plain talk
Readers of this column must have been surprised to witness its migration from far right to far left. This, I assure you, has no political significance, but merely reflects the belief that change is an important factor in our lives. The shift in fact reminded me of an amusing anecdote.
When I worked as a cultural attaché in London, one of the many British women's institutes then operating requested a visit to our cultural centre, and on the appointed day a group of charming elderly ladies arrived. We took them around the building and when we came to the library, they examined its rich collection of important and rare books on Egypt, including the complete Sir Flinders Petrie Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt. They looked at the Arabic books with amazement, and when I explained to them that Arabic is written from right to left one of them asked innocently: "Does this mean that all Egyptians are left-handed?"
Now to business: Lately a process of self-examination has been going on in England. Conferences have been held discussing the English language and its apparent demise; one seminar focused on theatre and its many as yet unresolved issues, while a series of articles that appeared in a leading newspaper under the title "The Doming of Britain" dealt with the decline of the arts. There is no doubt that self-criticism is a healthy phenomenon: it reflects a commendable awareness of society and culture. The process was initially inspired by the rise of New Labour, after which almost every aspect of British life was thoroughly questioned.
The most recent debates focused on Shakespeare. Many called for removing his plays from the school curriculum; others called for abridging the texts and cutting out characters to make the plays accessible to today's audience. And Peter Brook, one of England's leading directors, went so far as to produce "a reduced Hamlet." Brook's Hamlet at the Theatre des Bouffes du Mord in Paris does not begin with the words, "Who's there?" but rather with the figure of Horatio walking out to the front of the bare stage. Many characters and speeches were cut, including the speech in which Claudius announces his marriage to the court. The play was edited down.
As if this is not enough, the Independent published an article with the title "Shakespeare J'Accuse: why I blame the Bard for the death of English theatre." In it Jonathan Myerson recounts his own experience with Shakespeare. He describes watching a Royal Shakespeare Company production of Cymbeline, admitting that he had never before seen or read the play. It would thus be the "supreme test for someone who had shunned Shakespeare for years." Shakespeare just manages to "hold his head above water until the appearance of Bellarius, giving a 20-line speech... I did not understand a single word. I really concentrated but no, if you dragged me from the audience at that moment and -- like a GCSE English literature candidate -- ordered me to paraphrase his soliloquy, I could not have inscribed a single coherent sentence."
The writer wonders whether all those who were sitting around him managed any better. Was he alone in his confusion? He goes on to explain how Shakespeare is "the boss of English literature, because there is no better playwright ever, because we did him at school," and finally poses the question, "Why do we give over so much of our stage time to re-performing the same old creaky 37 plays?" The Bard alone is to blame for the reluctance of the young to go to the theatre. It is because their first encounter with grown-up theatre was what he calls "the Shakespeare Set Text." It is the non-English speaking world that gets the best of Shakespeare, Myerson concludes, because they are forced to translate him and he is thus instantly and adequately modernised, "often by the best poets": see the Russian version of Othello, for example, translated by Boris Pasternak. The same applies to Japanese and Zulu presentations of the Bard.
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly. All rights reserved
 |
|
|||||||||||||||||
| ARCHIVES Letter from the Editor Editorial Board Subscription Advertise! |
WEEKLY ONLINE: www.ahram.org.eg/weekly Updated every Saturday at 11.00 GMT, 2pm local time weeklyweb@ahram.org.eg |
 Al-Ahram Organisation |
Recommend this page