Shakespeare Performances in England, 1992

Summary

There seems to be a peculiar difficulty these days in fitting Shakespeare productions to the available theatre spaces. At one end of the range, small theatres and theatre-spaces do not necessarily either only deserve or only receive small-scale productions. The necessary aim of aptness and appropriateness of scale can often result in productions being oversized or, equally common at the other end of the spectrum, undersized for their stages. Some productions take on the scale assumed to be required by a particular space only to find that assumptions about that scale have carried with them, parasitically, assumptions about an appropriate style that are constricting and stultifying. As directors confront the often bewildering variety of spaces in which Shakespeare plays are now performed, their sense of scale often seems to go seriously awry. In the Royal Shakespeare Company the problems are exacerbated both by the tempting availability in Stratford of that most desirable of theatres, the Swan, a theatre into which many Shakespeare plays seem so naturally to fit, and by the awkwardnesses of the main house, a theatre into which the talents of the cast and crew seem now all too rarely to fit.

I take it that there are, along this particular faultline, two modes of production which ensure that the tectonic plates of production and theatre do not grind together, split apart or awkwardly overlay each other: the productions which manage the perfect and comfortable fit, small-scale in, say, the Other Place or medium in the Swan, and productions which make the space appear exhilaratingly barely able to contain them, the strain at the seams being a controlled part of the effect.