Jonathon Kay’s production
of
Richard II
To do this review I had to think about introducing new words, much like Shakespeare himself had to, hence when he got stuck on what to call a thing other than a thing, he introduced words into the English language such as bubble.
It is an important aspect for any new and evolving thing, to give it some sort of description and new words need to be introduced, particularly concerning new things. With new things in mind, I refer to Jonathon Kay’s production of Richard II, not that the story is anything new in itself but the delivery certainly is, so much so that yes, I needed to think of new words in order to describe this strange new delivery.
First and foremost, we are dealing with Shakespeare stripped right back and re-invented for the modern day sceptic and this is where I found myself taken back by this new approach to making it work. To say no words could describe it, would be a cop out, so I had to think of some new words in order that the average laymen like myself would be intrigued enough to go see it.
So in that respect I think Jonathon Kay has given us Shape-Foolery: Don’t bother looking it up- it is a new term which, like the word Dalek, will most likely end up in the Oxford English Dictionary, as soon as the word is out on the street about how amazing this play actually is. So what is shape-foolery ? other than a clever attempt to stick two words together. Well, it is the art of performing Shape-spear…
mmm…ok, I imagine you are wondering what that is, I forgot to mention that Shape-spear is another new word, which is rather frustrating isn’t it, particularly when I’m trying to describe something few have seen before.
Ok, let’s start again…
SHAPE-FOOLERY
Shape-Foolery: This is the art of using the body to form new shapes. It is a childish concept really but sometimes it is important to embrace ones childish side, in order to get into the idea of what shape foolery is all about. Childish in the respect that we were all children at one point and much of the idea of Shape-foolery comes from this frame of mind.
So make-believe is in fact a very basic requirement, it is a prerequisite for much of what expression is about, especially if one associates it with the idea of Tom Foolery, which for me doesn’t quite cut the mustard when describing this play. None the less, Jonathon Kay has directed this version of Richard II with absolute fool hardy conviction, so to be fooled by its majestic qualities was a joy and this play is all about fooling.
Fooling myself and everybody else who wished to be fooled, by a simulation of the reality, like a mirror for the audience to gaze within and pretend to see beyond its confines. Shape-foolery takes on this concept very well: combining traditional theatre with the art of make believe. Stripping away the need for props and indeed any sort of stage vices, what we are left with is Shape-foolery: Where the performers become one and everyone becomes a thing or many things.
It is the essences of street mime: improvisation and many other forms of performance combined to engage the audience. At one point in your schooling, you might have seen (or even participated) in the school play, perhaps you played a tree or perhaps you played a goat. In my school, I was a wood beam in Noah’s Ark. Shape-foolery takes this idea even further, so much so, that when it is applied to Shakespeare it took on even more dimensions, where actors were even performing the ocean itself. So I thought: “well, this is something very new and fresh…” and so from Shape-Foolery to Shakespeare we perhaps have a new genre: Shape-Speare: The art of performing Shakespeare using Shape-foolery.
To successfully engage the audience in a make believe world that they might not be accustomed to, I found Jonathon Kay’s production of Richard II surpassed any expectations I might have had. I suspect Mr Kay is very much a pragmatist, in the sense that he is showing his version in a way that my mind had to keep attention. For there were no key points of reference other than the performers and the characters that they morphed into. The morphing aspect worked particularly well because the observer had to use their own imagination to see any protagonist as not just one actor but many or none at all.
I found myself captivated and rewarded by the ‘getting of it’: I could actually see the actor as no longer an actor but as a chair and then a horse and then the ocean and then a jousting tournament, indeed this adaptation of Richard II works the mind very well.
Working the creative mind, is as much as reading a book of fiction and using ones imagination to create that chair, or that horse, or the ocean or the jousting tournament, and create the rest. Indeed, what Mr Kay has achieved is the literal pages of Shakespeare, taking each sentence, each phrase and like a book, leaving the rest up to the imagination of the reader/spectator.
Ultimately what I saw here was in essence the pure animation of the words themselves, using the articulation of form to produce quite literally a poetry in motion, which left me spell bounded. I guess you had to be there…
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