Since its troubled premiere at the Paris Opera in 1838, Berlioz's ''Benvenuto Cellini'' has intrigued and befuddled opera companies, stage directors and audiences. It's a curious work -- call it an epic historical comedy -- that exists in several conflicting versions. And it either boldly or confusingly (depending upon your perspective) juxtaposes diverse operatic styles in trying to tell the story of Cellini, the 16th-century Italian sculptor, goldsmith, miscreant and self-aggrandizing memoirist.
Many conductors enormously respect the score, which abounds with inventive and engaging music. But over the years not many companies have stepped up to produce it. I've encountered the work only twice: the 1975 American premiere by the Opera Company of Boston under Sarah Caldwell with Jon Vickers in the title role, and on Thursday night at the Metropolitan Opera.
It was the opening of the company's first production ever, by the director Andrei Serban in his Met debut, with James Levine conducting and the tenor Marcello Giordani in the title role. This is the second installment of the Met's celebration of the 200th anniversary of Berlioz's birth, the first being ''Les Troyens'' last spring.
Mr. Serban's production crowds the stage with dancers, extras, surreal props and more commedia dell'arte antics than you would have thought possible to fit into a night at the opera. When he and the production team, including the set designer George Tsypin and the costume designer Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, took their joint curtain call, they were greeted by a mixed chorus of lusty boos and ardent bravos, which essentially encapsulated my own reactions.
The clumsy plot focuses on a breakthrough moment in Cellini's life, when he was about to cast the monumental statue of Perseus with the severed head of Medusa. In the opera, Pope Clement VII has commissioned the work over the opposition of his scheming Vatican treasurer, Balducci, who favors a mediocrity, the sculptor Fieramosca, whom he plans to marry to his lovely young daughter, Teresa. But Teresa is smitten with Cellini. The ensuing story tells of Cellini's attempt to hoodwink Balducci, win Teresa, secure a pardon for inadvertently stabbing a monk at a brawl -- and cast his statue, a feat he pulls off in the triumphant final scene.
Berlioz extracted his popular ''Roman Carnival Overture,'' from portions of ''Benvenuto Cellini,'' which takes place in Rome during revels for Shrove Monday, and Mr. Serban's production is like a three-ring circus.
The set is dominated by a huge, rotating, semicircular house of translucent marble with twin twisting staircases. Scaffolding and ladders lean against the inside walls, bringing to mind those Renaissance paintings in which ladders symbolize the arduous route to heaven.
A constant swarm of commedia dell'arte characters flit across the stage and poke out of windows. In a heavy-handed touch, Berlioz, in the person of a red-haired, lanky man in a 19th-century waistcoat, wanders about the stage observing the action and jotting down notes.
In his Met debut, the choreographer Nikolaus Wolcz has devised some stylized, jerky movements for a roster of brawny men who portray Cellini's fellow metalworkers. At one point two Adonislike youths appear wielding swords and wearing nothing but fig leaves: idealized apparitions of Perseus and Medusa? It may not have made sense, but you can bet that for about 10 minutes most people in the house were not paying much attention to their Met Titles.
Still, however fanciful or alluring the antics and images, there is just too much going on. Apparently the staging was even more cluttered before Mr. Serban was prevailed upon by the Met to thin things out a bit.
His work stood in contrast to Mr. Levine's, who captured the score's high spirits but also its subtlety, tenderness and grandeur. The music constantly surprises you with its shifting meters, elusive rhythms and roving harmonies.
Even the comedic bits are often delicate and graceful, for example, the gossamer trio in the first scene, sung by Cellini, Teresa and the hidden Fieramosca. Would that more of those qualities had been reflected in the staging.
duminică, 31 august 2008
Articol despre Andrei Serban in presa americana
Not for All Time
As the A.R.T. begins rehearsal for Pericles, Arthur Holmberg setsAndrei Serban's Shakespeare productions in historical context.
Above:The Merchant of Venice (1998)
Above & below: The Taming of the Shrew (1998)
The past hundred years will go down in theatre history as the age of the director. Although the twentieth century also produced great playwrights, the emergence of the auteur director sets modern drama apart from all previous ages of theatre. In many respects, the evolution of twentieth-century theatre has been driven by auteur directors, directors who have contributed much to what is distinctive about modern theatre. The term "auteur director" was borrowed from French film criticism and means that the director is the author of the theatrical event.
During the past century, directors as much as playwrights have created the new forms that characterize the restlessness of modern drama: Realism, Symbolism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and the Theatre of Images. Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Artaud and Brecht (as director), Peter Brook and Robert Wilson - these artists gave as much to the rich variety of our theatrical traditions as did playwrights. Some scholars, in fact, consider Brecht as director more influential than Brecht as playwright. One cannot write the history of our theatre without acknowledging that the modern director is an artist in his or her own right.
Whereas students of film accept as dogma the auteur director, in theatre his emergence has sparked squabbles and lawsuits. Whose play is it anyway? Much ink has been spilled in classrooms and courtrooms over this issue. In one of the notorious controversies of contemporary theatre, Samuel Beckett tried to shut down the A.R.T.'s production of Endgame. The playwright damned the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis as heresy. Beckett objected to a racially mixed cast and to the set design, both of which he felt distracted the audience from his text.Beckett's dismay raises serious questions about interpretation, artistic collaboration, and the complex relationship between text and performance. Behind all these concerns, and often unacknowledged, lies the great conflict: which is more important, word or image, ear or eye? A play does not exist in a book one reads in a library. As the British director Jonathan Miller notes, performance is a constitutive part of the identity of a play. A play exists only in performance, and performances that rethink a text with strong visual images provoke debate.
Nowhere does this controversy come into sharper focus than in the plays of Shakespeare, the most canonical playwright of the canon and Armageddon of the word-image war. Shakespeare, in fact, has attracted auteur directors like moths to a flame. To be writ large in the history of theatre, one must climb Mt. Everest, and many of the landmark productions that prompted shifts in performance styles have originated with Shakespeare.
These productions have also altered how we understand Shakespeare's plays. In Changing Styles in Shakespeare Ralph Berry asserts that in the last generation, "The most interesting and influential reappraisals of certain plays have been launched by performances." Peter Brook's King Lear, for example, brought that play into the absurd universe of Beckett. The stage has assumed a higher intellectual profile with the rise to power of the director who reinterprets classics from a forceful stance. "Wrestling physically with a great dramatic text - working out the problems of how to do it - is a form of sustained, detailed literary critcism," declares Jonathan Miller, who produced two years of the Shakespeare plays on PBS and directed Sheridan's The School for Scandal at the A.R.T.
Not everyone, however, approves of this need to reinterpret the past. "Young man, how dare you meddle with Our Shakespeare?" snarled a distraught dowager at Nigel Playfair's 1920 futurist As You Like It. The indignation continues, and so does the "meddling," undaunted. Even if we had enough information (we do not) to reconstruct a performance of Shakespeare exactly as done in his day, it would not work.
When applied to theatre, Roman Jakobson's model of verbal communication helps explain how theatre functions. In "Linguistics and Poetics," Jakobson lists six factors in any speech event: addresser, addressee, message, shared code, context and contact ("a physical channel and psychological connection between addresser and addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.")
In terms of Shakespeare and a contemporary audience, all six factors present problems that militate against communication. Code, context, and contact have obviously suffered a sea change. But the question of addresser, message, and addressee is not as simple as first appears. We are not the addressees of Shakespeare's message.
Twelfth Night (1989)Cherry Jones and Diane Lane
In The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco notes that each text postulates a Model Reader. The Model Spectator postulated by Shakespeare's plays does not correspond to anyone alive, well, and living in Cambridge. But the patrons of the Globe were not the addressees either. The addressee of Shakespeare's texts was the company of actors he wrote for. Shakespeare conceived of his plays as a script to perform. His "foul papers" were a cluster of instructions for a specific group of actors to act. Thus, he showed no interest in having the plays published. Shakespeare did not write his texts for us. We have them by chance and happenstance, and we will never have them in a completely reliable state.
My purpose is to illustrate the difficulty of trying to think of Shakespeare as the addresser of the message and us as the addressee. We are eavesdropping on a message sent to someone else. Many problems fall into place if we conceive of the cycle of communication that Shakespeare initiated as having ended once the troupe of actors he wrote for got his manuscript. The message in the bottle is sent to actors, not audience. After the actors receive the playwright's message, they set in motion a new cycle of communication in which they, the actors, are the addressers and the audience the addressee.
These two cycles are closely related and one is dependent on the other, but they remain two distinct cycles of communication. Unlike readers of a novel, the theatre audience can never be the addressee of the playwright. The point of contact for communication in theatre is the theatre. Put differently, the playwright's message must be performed, and performance is interpretation, representation, mediation. For this reason, Shakespeare speaks not for an age, but for all time. Only through fresh interpretations can he remain alive for succeeding generations. His plays are not just a historical document. They are a challenge to every great director to breathe new theatrical life into them so that they can live in the minds and hearts of new audiences.
Starting in the late '80s, a series of revolutionary stagings put Andrei Serban in the forefront of Shakespeare directors. His reinterpretation of Shylock, for instance, changed the way we think about that character. Rather than a tragic victim, Serban gave us a Borscht Belt comic. Similarly, his The Taming of the Shrew convinced many that a play often dismissed as a bagatelle is a richly rewarding text.
Twelfth Night (A.R.T., 1989); Cymbeline (NYSF, Central Park, 1998); The Taming of the Shrew (A.R.T., 1998); The Merchant of Venice (A.R.T., 1998; Comédie Française, 2001); Hamlet (NYSF, 1999); Richard III (La MaMa, 2001) - all Serban's Shakespeares had radically different styles. The French mounting of Merchant, for example, looked totally different from that at the A.R.T., and Will LeBow's Shylock was worlds away from the interpretation of Andrzej Seweryn in Paris.
"I confuse critics because my productions differ radically one from the other," muses Serban. "Directing a play, I lose myself. I search for its essence, so I, Andrei Serban, have no signature."
No matter how "radically different" one Serban production may be from another, the director always begins by immersing himself in the text, trying to understand what the playwright intended. Then Serban establishes a dialogue between past and present. Of all avant-garde directors, Serban has been the most scrupulous reader of classical texts, and this assiduous attention to language has produced dazzling stage images that illuminate rather than illustrate the script. With Serban, both word and image triumph.Arthur Holmberg is the A.R.T.'s Literary Director and Associate Professor of Theatre at Brandeis.
Suggestions for further reading:
William Shakespeare. Other late plays, which bear many similarities to Pericles.
Cymbeline (text from MIT archive)
The Tempest (text; 1995 A.R.T. production)
The Winter's Tale (text; 2000 A.R.T. production)
Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life The most complete recent biography of Shakespeare. (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Ed Menta, The Magic World Behind the Curtain: Andrei Serban in the American Theatre A study of Serban's work up to his 1989 Twelfth Night at the A.R.T. (Lang, 1995)
David Skeele, Thwarting the Wayward Seas A production history of Pericles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.(Associated University Presses, 1998)
As the A.R.T. begins rehearsal for Pericles, Arthur Holmberg setsAndrei Serban's Shakespeare productions in historical context.
Above:The Merchant of Venice (1998)
Above & below: The Taming of the Shrew (1998)
The past hundred years will go down in theatre history as the age of the director. Although the twentieth century also produced great playwrights, the emergence of the auteur director sets modern drama apart from all previous ages of theatre. In many respects, the evolution of twentieth-century theatre has been driven by auteur directors, directors who have contributed much to what is distinctive about modern theatre. The term "auteur director" was borrowed from French film criticism and means that the director is the author of the theatrical event.
During the past century, directors as much as playwrights have created the new forms that characterize the restlessness of modern drama: Realism, Symbolism, Futurism, Surrealism, Expressionism, and the Theatre of Images. Stanislavsky and Meyerhold, Artaud and Brecht (as director), Peter Brook and Robert Wilson - these artists gave as much to the rich variety of our theatrical traditions as did playwrights. Some scholars, in fact, consider Brecht as director more influential than Brecht as playwright. One cannot write the history of our theatre without acknowledging that the modern director is an artist in his or her own right.
Whereas students of film accept as dogma the auteur director, in theatre his emergence has sparked squabbles and lawsuits. Whose play is it anyway? Much ink has been spilled in classrooms and courtrooms over this issue. In one of the notorious controversies of contemporary theatre, Samuel Beckett tried to shut down the A.R.T.'s production of Endgame. The playwright damned the direction of JoAnne Akalaitis as heresy. Beckett objected to a racially mixed cast and to the set design, both of which he felt distracted the audience from his text.Beckett's dismay raises serious questions about interpretation, artistic collaboration, and the complex relationship between text and performance. Behind all these concerns, and often unacknowledged, lies the great conflict: which is more important, word or image, ear or eye? A play does not exist in a book one reads in a library. As the British director Jonathan Miller notes, performance is a constitutive part of the identity of a play. A play exists only in performance, and performances that rethink a text with strong visual images provoke debate.
Nowhere does this controversy come into sharper focus than in the plays of Shakespeare, the most canonical playwright of the canon and Armageddon of the word-image war. Shakespeare, in fact, has attracted auteur directors like moths to a flame. To be writ large in the history of theatre, one must climb Mt. Everest, and many of the landmark productions that prompted shifts in performance styles have originated with Shakespeare.
These productions have also altered how we understand Shakespeare's plays. In Changing Styles in Shakespeare Ralph Berry asserts that in the last generation, "The most interesting and influential reappraisals of certain plays have been launched by performances." Peter Brook's King Lear, for example, brought that play into the absurd universe of Beckett. The stage has assumed a higher intellectual profile with the rise to power of the director who reinterprets classics from a forceful stance. "Wrestling physically with a great dramatic text - working out the problems of how to do it - is a form of sustained, detailed literary critcism," declares Jonathan Miller, who produced two years of the Shakespeare plays on PBS and directed Sheridan's The School for Scandal at the A.R.T.
Not everyone, however, approves of this need to reinterpret the past. "Young man, how dare you meddle with Our Shakespeare?" snarled a distraught dowager at Nigel Playfair's 1920 futurist As You Like It. The indignation continues, and so does the "meddling," undaunted. Even if we had enough information (we do not) to reconstruct a performance of Shakespeare exactly as done in his day, it would not work.
When applied to theatre, Roman Jakobson's model of verbal communication helps explain how theatre functions. In "Linguistics and Poetics," Jakobson lists six factors in any speech event: addresser, addressee, message, shared code, context and contact ("a physical channel and psychological connection between addresser and addressee, enabling both of them to enter and stay in communication.")
In terms of Shakespeare and a contemporary audience, all six factors present problems that militate against communication. Code, context, and contact have obviously suffered a sea change. But the question of addresser, message, and addressee is not as simple as first appears. We are not the addressees of Shakespeare's message.
Twelfth Night (1989)Cherry Jones and Diane Lane
In The Role of the Reader, Umberto Eco notes that each text postulates a Model Reader. The Model Spectator postulated by Shakespeare's plays does not correspond to anyone alive, well, and living in Cambridge. But the patrons of the Globe were not the addressees either. The addressee of Shakespeare's texts was the company of actors he wrote for. Shakespeare conceived of his plays as a script to perform. His "foul papers" were a cluster of instructions for a specific group of actors to act. Thus, he showed no interest in having the plays published. Shakespeare did not write his texts for us. We have them by chance and happenstance, and we will never have them in a completely reliable state.
My purpose is to illustrate the difficulty of trying to think of Shakespeare as the addresser of the message and us as the addressee. We are eavesdropping on a message sent to someone else. Many problems fall into place if we conceive of the cycle of communication that Shakespeare initiated as having ended once the troupe of actors he wrote for got his manuscript. The message in the bottle is sent to actors, not audience. After the actors receive the playwright's message, they set in motion a new cycle of communication in which they, the actors, are the addressers and the audience the addressee.
These two cycles are closely related and one is dependent on the other, but they remain two distinct cycles of communication. Unlike readers of a novel, the theatre audience can never be the addressee of the playwright. The point of contact for communication in theatre is the theatre. Put differently, the playwright's message must be performed, and performance is interpretation, representation, mediation. For this reason, Shakespeare speaks not for an age, but for all time. Only through fresh interpretations can he remain alive for succeeding generations. His plays are not just a historical document. They are a challenge to every great director to breathe new theatrical life into them so that they can live in the minds and hearts of new audiences.
Starting in the late '80s, a series of revolutionary stagings put Andrei Serban in the forefront of Shakespeare directors. His reinterpretation of Shylock, for instance, changed the way we think about that character. Rather than a tragic victim, Serban gave us a Borscht Belt comic. Similarly, his The Taming of the Shrew convinced many that a play often dismissed as a bagatelle is a richly rewarding text.
Twelfth Night (A.R.T., 1989); Cymbeline (NYSF, Central Park, 1998); The Taming of the Shrew (A.R.T., 1998); The Merchant of Venice (A.R.T., 1998; Comédie Française, 2001); Hamlet (NYSF, 1999); Richard III (La MaMa, 2001) - all Serban's Shakespeares had radically different styles. The French mounting of Merchant, for example, looked totally different from that at the A.R.T., and Will LeBow's Shylock was worlds away from the interpretation of Andrzej Seweryn in Paris.
"I confuse critics because my productions differ radically one from the other," muses Serban. "Directing a play, I lose myself. I search for its essence, so I, Andrei Serban, have no signature."
No matter how "radically different" one Serban production may be from another, the director always begins by immersing himself in the text, trying to understand what the playwright intended. Then Serban establishes a dialogue between past and present. Of all avant-garde directors, Serban has been the most scrupulous reader of classical texts, and this assiduous attention to language has produced dazzling stage images that illuminate rather than illustrate the script. With Serban, both word and image triumph.Arthur Holmberg is the A.R.T.'s Literary Director and Associate Professor of Theatre at Brandeis.
Suggestions for further reading:
William Shakespeare. Other late plays, which bear many similarities to Pericles.
Cymbeline (text from MIT archive)
The Tempest (text; 1995 A.R.T. production)
The Winter's Tale (text; 2000 A.R.T. production)
Park Honan, Shakespeare: A Life The most complete recent biography of Shakespeare. (Oxford University Press, 1998)
Ed Menta, The Magic World Behind the Curtain: Andrei Serban in the American Theatre A study of Serban's work up to his 1989 Twelfth Night at the A.R.T. (Lang, 1995)
David Skeele, Thwarting the Wayward Seas A production history of Pericles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.(Associated University Presses, 1998)
Negutatorul din Venetia, regia Andrei Serban la ART Boston
"After last season's wild and wonderful The Taming of the Shrew, Andrei Serban returns to give this provocative, charming, and controversial play his own inventive, contemporary touch"
Interviu cu Andrei Serban semnat Gideon Lester
A Shrew for All Seasons
Gideon Lester talks to director Andrei Serban about his plans for The Taming of the Shrew
Romanian director Andrei Serban has been associated with the A.R.T. for more than twenty years. His productions include The King Stag, Three Sisters, The Good Woman of Setzuan, Twelfth Night, and Sganarelle. From 1990-1994 he was Artistic Director of the Romanian National Theatre. Mr. Serban is also internationally renowned as an opera director. A recipient of Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundation grants, he is currently director of the Drama Department of Columbia University.
GL: You directed Twelfth Night at the A.R.T. in 1989. Have you staged many of Shakespeare's other plays?
AS: I directed As You Like It in France, in the real Forest of Arden, and a Measure for Measure at the National Theatre of Finland in Helsinki. I did a Julius Caesar in Romania when I was nineteen years old and still a student. We used the Japanese Kabuki style, building a flower bridge over the audience. Caesar's death was very stylized, performed in slow motion. Today these techniques are old hat, but in Romania in 1968 they seemed political and absolutely unacceptable. It was an enormous scandal and afterwards it was very hard for me to find a job. That was my most daring production ever.
GL: When Robert Brustein asked you to return to A.R.T. to direct Shrew, what was your reaction?
AS: I had never really thought about directing it before. I had seen several productions of Shrew in the past, and was unbelievably bored. I thought it was a dreadful play. It was only when Brustein suggested it that I finally read it. I found it a very paradoxical play, full of contradictions and questions for our time. It raises issues of gender, sexual politics, and the nature of love and marriage. All these notions meant something totally different for Shakespeare than they do for us today. I imagine him as a man entering the new, modern world of the Renaissance, but coming from the old, Medieval world. When I look at his plays, Shakespeare seems a conservative man. He sees the world from an esoteric, symbolic point of view, rather than in the scientific, progressive style of the Renaissance. The characters in Shrew are allegories, they're symbols. The battle of Petruchio and Kate is not necessarily that of man versus woman, man subduing woman, the woman being the victim. Shakespeare was influenced by the religious Medieval mystery plays and church dramas that were still being performed until about fifty years before he started writing, in which man and woman were allegories for the soul and the spirit. If we look at Shrew from that point of view, the woman, Kate, is the soul that has to meet the spirit. The union at the end of the play is the result of discipline, rigor, work, and taming. But the taming is metaphysical, not sexual political, and that's something we find very hard to connect with. Our world is very different from Shakespeare's. Even so, theatre is a mirror of the essence of human life, and the human values of Shakespeare's play still exist within us. That's what makes it interesting.
GL: So your Shrew will be a spiritual exploration?
AS: It's now impossible for us to stage the Shrew that I think Shakespeare wrote, a spiritual journey much like Dante's. Nobody could understand that today. So we still have to deal with the very delicate issue of sexual politics, and I'm not quite so sure how I'm going to solve it from that point of view. I absolutely refuse to look at the play from the safe standpoint of political correctness, which says that Shakespeare wrote a play about a victim, Kate, and an oppressor, Petruchio, in which women come out as the victims of men. That's quite untrue; he didn't write that play. There isn't one line that justifies such a simplistic approach. It is this kind of superficial reading that makes political correctness the disaster of our time. But I also don't want to treat the play as a romantic love story. Kate and Petruchio are not Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. They don't play tricks on each other, loving each other underneath it all. I don't know what the relationship is; that's why I'm rehearsing it. The reason I go into rehearsal is that I truly don't know the play. My only hope is that by the time it opens, I start to have an understanding of what the play might mean. Whenever I see a production of mine at opening night, I wish I could start again, because by then I say, "Ah, that's how it should be." Of course it's too late. All theatre should be a continuous work in progress. We can never find the definitive answer; we should just ask the right questions. Shakespeare wrote this play which is controversial, which is paradoxical. It makes us go home and ask ourselves, "What is the relation between two people? What is a sexual relationship? What is love?" I think that's enough for the price of a ticket. And if we can also be entertained in the process, so much the better.
GL: When you worked on Twelfth Night at A.R.T., you didn't cut a single line before you started rehearsing. You have already cut the script of Shrew comprehensively. Why the different approach?
AS: Shrew is a much earlier play than Twelfth Night. It may be the second or third play that Shakespeare wrote. The poetry isn't at its highest here. The language is muscular, the energy is that of a young writer trying to find himself. There are therefore many repetitions and lines which are difficult to understand today, and I don't find them necessary. The plot is a fast-paced, physical comedy that is almost Roman, like that of Plautus or Aristophanes. Language isn't the most important element in Shrew. In Shakespeare's later plays his language becomes more sophisticated and therefore needs more attention.
GL: Many directors cut the frame story, which concerns the drunkard Christopher Sly. Why have you chosen to retain it?
AS: The play The Taming of the Shrew is acted for Sly; it's like a subconscious dream in which he learns how to tame his own wife. For Sly the play has a moral, but since he wakes up once it's over, the effect is also Pirandellian. Is theatre a reality, Shakespeare asks, or is it a dream?
GL: And in your production, the actors who perform the play for Shrew will be members of the A.R.T. company?
AS: Yes. The actors are on tour with King Stag and Six Characters in Search of an Author, and here they decide to stage one more play. Very soon, though, the modern joke is forgotten. The actors' truck is disassembled and becomes almost like a commedia dell'arte stage where the actors perform as if they were in the sixteenth century. At the end of the play it becomes a truck again. The point is that with Shakespeare we can travel in time, bringing modern elements to the play or journeying back and finding out how it was once upon a time. This link between tradition and the present day is a bridge that we very much need. That's why we perform classical plays. The clash between a past ideology and our own is very dramatic; through it we can understand something of ourselves.
Gideon Lester is A.R.T.'s Resident Dramaturg.
Gideon Lester talks to director Andrei Serban about his plans for The Taming of the Shrew
Romanian director Andrei Serban has been associated with the A.R.T. for more than twenty years. His productions include The King Stag, Three Sisters, The Good Woman of Setzuan, Twelfth Night, and Sganarelle. From 1990-1994 he was Artistic Director of the Romanian National Theatre. Mr. Serban is also internationally renowned as an opera director. A recipient of Ford, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller Foundation grants, he is currently director of the Drama Department of Columbia University.
GL: You directed Twelfth Night at the A.R.T. in 1989. Have you staged many of Shakespeare's other plays?
AS: I directed As You Like It in France, in the real Forest of Arden, and a Measure for Measure at the National Theatre of Finland in Helsinki. I did a Julius Caesar in Romania when I was nineteen years old and still a student. We used the Japanese Kabuki style, building a flower bridge over the audience. Caesar's death was very stylized, performed in slow motion. Today these techniques are old hat, but in Romania in 1968 they seemed political and absolutely unacceptable. It was an enormous scandal and afterwards it was very hard for me to find a job. That was my most daring production ever.
GL: When Robert Brustein asked you to return to A.R.T. to direct Shrew, what was your reaction?
AS: I had never really thought about directing it before. I had seen several productions of Shrew in the past, and was unbelievably bored. I thought it was a dreadful play. It was only when Brustein suggested it that I finally read it. I found it a very paradoxical play, full of contradictions and questions for our time. It raises issues of gender, sexual politics, and the nature of love and marriage. All these notions meant something totally different for Shakespeare than they do for us today. I imagine him as a man entering the new, modern world of the Renaissance, but coming from the old, Medieval world. When I look at his plays, Shakespeare seems a conservative man. He sees the world from an esoteric, symbolic point of view, rather than in the scientific, progressive style of the Renaissance. The characters in Shrew are allegories, they're symbols. The battle of Petruchio and Kate is not necessarily that of man versus woman, man subduing woman, the woman being the victim. Shakespeare was influenced by the religious Medieval mystery plays and church dramas that were still being performed until about fifty years before he started writing, in which man and woman were allegories for the soul and the spirit. If we look at Shrew from that point of view, the woman, Kate, is the soul that has to meet the spirit. The union at the end of the play is the result of discipline, rigor, work, and taming. But the taming is metaphysical, not sexual political, and that's something we find very hard to connect with. Our world is very different from Shakespeare's. Even so, theatre is a mirror of the essence of human life, and the human values of Shakespeare's play still exist within us. That's what makes it interesting.
GL: So your Shrew will be a spiritual exploration?
AS: It's now impossible for us to stage the Shrew that I think Shakespeare wrote, a spiritual journey much like Dante's. Nobody could understand that today. So we still have to deal with the very delicate issue of sexual politics, and I'm not quite so sure how I'm going to solve it from that point of view. I absolutely refuse to look at the play from the safe standpoint of political correctness, which says that Shakespeare wrote a play about a victim, Kate, and an oppressor, Petruchio, in which women come out as the victims of men. That's quite untrue; he didn't write that play. There isn't one line that justifies such a simplistic approach. It is this kind of superficial reading that makes political correctness the disaster of our time. But I also don't want to treat the play as a romantic love story. Kate and Petruchio are not Beatrice and Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing. They don't play tricks on each other, loving each other underneath it all. I don't know what the relationship is; that's why I'm rehearsing it. The reason I go into rehearsal is that I truly don't know the play. My only hope is that by the time it opens, I start to have an understanding of what the play might mean. Whenever I see a production of mine at opening night, I wish I could start again, because by then I say, "Ah, that's how it should be." Of course it's too late. All theatre should be a continuous work in progress. We can never find the definitive answer; we should just ask the right questions. Shakespeare wrote this play which is controversial, which is paradoxical. It makes us go home and ask ourselves, "What is the relation between two people? What is a sexual relationship? What is love?" I think that's enough for the price of a ticket. And if we can also be entertained in the process, so much the better.
GL: When you worked on Twelfth Night at A.R.T., you didn't cut a single line before you started rehearsing. You have already cut the script of Shrew comprehensively. Why the different approach?
AS: Shrew is a much earlier play than Twelfth Night. It may be the second or third play that Shakespeare wrote. The poetry isn't at its highest here. The language is muscular, the energy is that of a young writer trying to find himself. There are therefore many repetitions and lines which are difficult to understand today, and I don't find them necessary. The plot is a fast-paced, physical comedy that is almost Roman, like that of Plautus or Aristophanes. Language isn't the most important element in Shrew. In Shakespeare's later plays his language becomes more sophisticated and therefore needs more attention.
GL: Many directors cut the frame story, which concerns the drunkard Christopher Sly. Why have you chosen to retain it?
AS: The play The Taming of the Shrew is acted for Sly; it's like a subconscious dream in which he learns how to tame his own wife. For Sly the play has a moral, but since he wakes up once it's over, the effect is also Pirandellian. Is theatre a reality, Shakespeare asks, or is it a dream?
GL: And in your production, the actors who perform the play for Shrew will be members of the A.R.T. company?
AS: Yes. The actors are on tour with King Stag and Six Characters in Search of an Author, and here they decide to stage one more play. Very soon, though, the modern joke is forgotten. The actors' truck is disassembled and becomes almost like a commedia dell'arte stage where the actors perform as if they were in the sixteenth century. At the end of the play it becomes a truck again. The point is that with Shakespeare we can travel in time, bringing modern elements to the play or journeying back and finding out how it was once upon a time. This link between tradition and the present day is a bridge that we very much need. That's why we perform classical plays. The clash between a past ideology and our own is very dramatic; through it we can understand something of ourselves.
Gideon Lester is A.R.T.'s Resident Dramaturg.
Adriana Grand, sau perfectiunea in scenografie
Ghetou, Satyricon, Marat Sade, Opera de trei parale, Desteptarea primaverii, Purificare - sunt doar o mica parte din spectacolele cu o scenografie de geniu, semnatura : Adriana Grand
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