FILM AND TELEVISION

"Bard Timing"

With 13 Oscar nominations, Shakespeare in Love has outclassed one of the biggest box office hits of last year - Titanic.  The Bard' s stock seems as assured as ever.  Adaptation of the classics has provided the movie industry with suitable properties from its earliest days - even the silent era had its own renditions of Shakespeare.  Through the hundred or so years of the cinema, productions of his plays have served to generate even more as, each decade, different directors take different routes through the texts. 

In this revisionist mode, the adaptations operate a kind of internal dialogue as each new version challenges previous examples, to rework the text for the mood and temper of the times - often pressing the words and plots into the service of more immediate political effect.

This is clearly the case in the history plays - particularly in Laurence Olivier's 1944 version of Henry V.  The role of the film is made explicit right at the beginning, through the tribute to the airborne forces that were to lead the assault on D-Day.  In this telling version, Shakespeare's original ironic analysis of power and the pain of war is evacuated in favour of a neat piece of propaganda in war-time Britain.  Four decades or so later, Kenneth Branagh's interpretation acts as a commentary on Olivier's propaganda - where a more sombre atmosphere informs the same play - re-routed and channelled as an anti-war statement in the aftermath of lives lost in the South Atlantic.

The cultural and political potency of Hamlet and Macbeth emerges time and again in diverse contexts, as interpreters of the Shakespeare texts choose to shade the plays through emphasis or omission.  Recent theatrical renditions of the Prince of Denmark have elected to see it as a personal tragedy, cutting all reference to Fortinbras whereas Macbeth even manages to haunt some contemporary television crime fiction.

If history and politics are the more obvious themes for reworking in contemporary contexts, the film industry has shown that even the comedies are open to re-enactment.  Again, Branagh revisits Shakespeare to provide us with a luvvies' production of Much Ado about Nothing in an Italianate setting - replete with men in leathers.

The tragedy of Romeo and Juliet is always ripe for plunder, with Baz Luhrmann's exuberant production demonstrating how Shakespeare can be vigorously renewed to engage a young contemporary audience.  With an eye on the box office, Shakespeare in Love is also designed to appeal to both the literati and the great unwashed in the pit.  Suggesting parallels between the theatre of the time and today's movie business, the set bristles with Shakespearean-type quips melded with contemporary speech, in a situation awash with rival impresarios, temperamental thespians and raw market forces.  Once more into the breach, marketing to the fore, Shakespeare in Love pushes all the right buttons - English heritage, cultural value, young love and masquerade.  Mining the Bard's legacy, the film plays the contemporary youth card with a flourish - and, as young Will struts his hour upon the set in biker leathers, the costume clinches the Bard's contemporary timing.

Stephanie McBride