DVD Reviews: ‘Playing Shakespeare’ and ‘She Stoops to Conquer’

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Two DVD sets for fans of Olde English Theater.

‘Playing Shakespeare’ (Acorn). I am a little late with this review, but as the program this DVD set fetches back into the present is 25 years old, I don’t suppose the couple months that have gone by since its release will matter all that much. And apart from a frock or two, it is not the sort of thing that dates. (Its subject has stood an even longer test of time.) On a soundstage half-dressed to suggest a theater’s prop room, with a taped-off work space in the middle, director John Barton -- a hairy, bearish fellow who reminds me a little of the character John Noble plays on ‘Fringe,’ but more erudite and not crazy -- leads a nine-part master class in performing Shakespeare, with members of the Royal Shakespeare Company, which he co-founded, as his student-demonstrators. (This crew includes Ian McKellan, Ben Kingsley, Patrick Stewart, Roger Rees, David Suchet, Sinéad Cusack and Judi Dench, all dewy with youth, or near enough.)

The series -- taped in 1982 and aired in 1984 -- is about the nuts and bolts of bringing Shakespeare to life and how the text instructs the performance and how the performance must illuminate the text. (‘Shakespeare’s language,’ says Barton, ‘can be made to work on an audience as powerfully as an actor’s emotions can.’). There is an entire hour devoted to playing ambiguity and irony -- apparently a voice little used in the Britain of 1982, though inescapable today -- and another on the why and wherefore of iambic pentameter. They talk of what to do with rhyme, where to put the pauses, how to balance the intellectual and the emotional, naturalism with theatricality. (Barton is all about the balance.)

Reference is regularly made to Hamlet’s instructions to the players to ‘suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for any thing so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ‘twere, the mirror up to nature.’ Still, says Barton, you are left in the end with ‘very few rules but a lot of questions,’ and part of what keeps Shakespeare’s plays so endlessly playable is the difficulties they pose. The actors move in and out of character with magical suddenness, shading their interpretations this way and that according to Barton’s suggestions, and the crispness of the video image, and the looseness of the proceedings, makes it seem as if it might have been taped yesterday. It’s for you who love Shakespeare -- and of all the things to love in the world, that seems to me one of the most rewarding -- and who love acting, which is not to be confused with mere stardom.

‘She Stoops to Conquer’ (Acorn). Irish writer Oliver Goldsmith’s perennially popular comedy of concealed and mistaken identity debuted in London in 1773 (and traveled to Philadelphia within six months), an expression of his determination to bring big laughs back to the British stage. It seems appropriate, then, that for this energetic 2008 small-screen mounting, director-adapter Tony Britten has broken it up into five sitcom-sized episodes. (Each is introduced by a recap in the form of a ballad.) The conceit works well and points up the fact that it is not so long a trip from here to ‘Fawlty Towers.’

The wheels begin turning when young Tony Lumpkin (actor-comic Miles Jupp) convinces two young men that his stepfather’s house (which they are seeking) is actually an inn; things revolve toward a quick-developing courtship story wherein the titular heroine breaks a man of his shyness around gentlewomen by pretending to be a barmaid. Shot handsomely on location and deftly acted -- from which only Roy Marsden (TV’s P.D. James’ Adam Dagliesh) will be familiar to local audiences -- its jokes and stratagems are perfectly legible from the vantage of the early 21st century.

-- Robert Lloyd

(Roy Marsden in ‘She Stoops To Conquer.’ Photo credit: Acorn Media)