Abstract
Roman Tragedies transforms the stage into a high-tech version of Shakespeare’s Globe , mimicking how global media reduce social conflict to the compass of talking heads and scripted debates. Extending Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” conceit to a world connected by clouds of information transported on viewless wings and deposited in airy dropboxes, van Hove’s stage is everywhere and nowhere, trafficking on the uniform look and feel of the world’s centers of privilege and power. While Rancière suggests that even experiences designed to mirror our entrancement by mass-mediated spectacles cannot shut off people’s capacity to exercise “an unpredictable interplay of associations and dissociations,” van Hove arguably extends only the illusion of emancipation to spectators compelled to play the part of studio audiences distracted by competing demands on their attention.
Much of the material in this chapter was first published in “High-Tech Shakespeare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies and the Problem of Spectatorship,” James Bulman, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, Oxford: Oxford University Press, and reappears in revised, recontextualized, and enlarged form here.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
As Jane Howard, reviewing a recent performance of Kings of War at this year’s Adelaide Festival, writes: “Perhaps it is Roman Tragedies looming too large; perhaps it is that the lure of framing these stories by their smallness makes them not big enough to fill four-and-a-half hours. Tease apart the elements, you have something outstanding: step back and see the whole and, somehow, they all add up to less than their parts.” https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2018/mar/13/kings-of-war-review-ivo-van-hoves-stunning-shakespeare-marathon-somehow-falls-short. Accessed August 8, 2018.
Lynn Gardner offers a more positive assessment of an earlier production of Kings of War, in June 2015 at the Holland Festival, concluding, “Van Hove’s production may begin with a quick run through the kings and queens of England, starting from the present day, but this stark pageant of deaths and coronations, performed in Dutch with English surtitles, is not the kind of history play that you’ll find performed by the RSC. This startling new drama speaks both to the past and the present as it highlights the way in which the misuse of power leads to greater abuses, and how often our leaders’ self-importance and desire for legacy can undo both them and us.” Favorably comparing the production’s value with what one can expect of the RSC is particularly notable. See https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2015/jun/21/kings-of-war-review-shakespeare-with-shock-and-awe. Accessed August 8, 2018.
- 2.
See https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2014/jul/16/the-fountainhead-review-ivo-van-howe-ayn-rand-avignon-festival and https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/29/theater/the-fountainhead-ivo-van-hove-review.html where Brantley also claims that van Hove “brings to Rand’s warring titans the awe and titillation you might have experienced in reading about them as a sensitive 14-year-old, when life was a daily onslaught of humiliations from people who couldn’t grasp how special you were. Mr. van Hove and his team of ardent performers never step outside this current of tortured self-regard. Give them half a chance, and they’ll sweep you right up into its raging flow.” Accessed August 8, 2018.
- 3.
Cf. Jonathan Kalb’s “Afterthoughts on Ivo van Hove’s The Fountainhead: ” “It really ought to be said that this production’s abdication of critical engagement raises Randian questions of selfishness and irresponsibility regarding the director, especially in light of the fact that his signature stylistic gestures were so generic this time. The show wasn’t merely tedious and disappointing but something more troubling than that. Van Hove is currently the most prominent and celebrated European star director working on the American stage, and he used his privileged position atop the high-culture pyramid in this case to deliver, in effect, a drowning gulp of unfiltered triumphal-capitalist propaganda to an American audience under vicious assault by kleptocratic billionaires posing as our political leaders … I delighted in some of Van Hove’s early work in this country, but for a while now he has seemed to me the theatrical equivalent of a starchitect like Howard Roark himself … Van Hove’s The Fountainhead is [a] decontextualized prestige-project. It tells a tale of ego, glamour, and repudiation of social duty through a theatrical language that heedlessly maximizes ego and glamour. That leaves you with the very uncomfortable impression that this director might be as willfully blinkered about the role of art in society as Ayn Rand was.” https://thetheatretimes.com/afterthoughts-on-the-fountainhead/. Accessed August 8, 2018.
- 4.
The performances specifically referenced and reconstructed in this chapter took place on 29 May 2010 at the Monument-National Theatre in Montreal and on 17 November 2012 at the Howard Gilman Opera House of the Brooklyn Academy of Music . Later performances update and re-program what is visible to the audience on the onstage monitors .
- 5.
As brilliantly detailed by James Ball III (2018, 304–309), Twitter became the preferred medium of audience response as long ago as 2012 during performances of Roman Tragedies.
- 6.
Questions like these and a host of others are posed and deftly explored by Rob Conkie and comic book artist Bernard Caleo in “Graphic Shakespeare ,” the fourth chapter of Conkie’s Writing Performative Shakespeares (2016). As Conkie describes it, the chapter “celebrates, via the celebrated production event of Toneelgroep Amsterdam’s Roman Tragedies, the eventness of production, its atmosphere, its embodiment , its affect. The comic book form of the chapter is able to stage impossibilities, like an intertextual reminiscence of a previous production, or a round table conversation about Roman Tragedies … (actually taken from the published accounts of the production [at different times and locations] by those seated at the table)” (2016, 22).
- 7.
See the forum devoted to Sleep No More in Borrowers and Lenders, 7:2 (2012/2013), particularly the contributions of Colette Gordon , J. D. Oxblood , and myself. For a more detailed and wide-ranging assessment of Sleep No More, see W. B. Worthen’s chapter on the production in Shakespeare Performance Studies (2014, 80–147). In more recent comments on Sleep No More , Marvin Carlson writes that while SNM’s spectator-participant, particularly the repeat customer-consumer who either attends multiple “performances” and/or extends her participation on Web sites or chat-groups, “is in a sense emancipated,” it is “what might be called virtual emancipation. The spectator has changed from an observer to a player, but the game still remains someone else’s. This largely illusory emancipation has important implications both for the theatre as an art form and as a social process. The enormous financial success of Sleep No More, the increasingly obvious commercialization of it and of many of its imitators, suggesting in many aspects the commercialization of theatrical experience by the Disney corporation, calls attention to another social structure whose ability and drive to consume everything it encounters exceeds even that of theatre, and that is the operations of capitalism” (2016, 115–116)
- 8.
James Ball III documents a more “insidious” form of intra-audience competition taking place during one of the same November, 2012 performances I attended: “Being a spectator to the Roman Tragedies required physical choices and so had bodily effects. A particularly insidious game of musical chairs developed as audience members staked out their territory onstage. Some found an agreeable couch and refused to budge from it for the duration. Others became strategic, closely watching the countdown clocks that marked each scene change, waiting for an open seat to appear. Territorial maneuvering began to occupy more and more of the spectator’s energy, and a zero-sum game of maintaining one’s hold on a spot of turf developed: many shifted in place to optimize a changing view of the scene without relinquishing a claim to space or property” (Ball 2018, 306).
- 9.
The live-relayed flight to the street outside the theater by the actor playing Enobarbus (Chico Kensari in Montréal, Bart Slegers in Brooklyn) is a repeated feature of every performance of Roman Tragedies wherever it is performed. Similar live-relayed flights to the street by actors performing other parts in other plays is a commonplace component of van Hove’s dramaturgy, going back at least as far as his production of The Misanthrope for the New York Theater Workshop in 2007, which featured a stand-out performance by Bill Camp as Alceste, and extending as far as his staging of Luchino Visconti’s The Damned (1969) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York in July, 2018.
- 10.
A clue to how globalization wends its way into van Hove’s understanding of Shakespeare, and his and Jan Versweyveld’s imagining “a stupefying convention hall as the set,” is supplied in the program notes for the Montreal production where we find that
“In the Roman tragedies [Shakespeare] examined basic concepts such as conflicts between individual moral conscience and the immoral acts necessary to obtain power, the relationship between public life and private life, the place of the people in the world of government, and how individuals perform in political circumstances. Ivo van Hove seeks to address all such matters present in Coriolanus, Julius Caesar , and Antony and Cleopatra and in that order, rather than the order in which they were written. ‘I wanted the audience to in effect see the evolution of history from the very difficult beginnings of democracy in Coriolanus to the invention of a sort of bipartisanship in Julius Caesar and then on the globalized world of Antony and Cleopatra.’ To that end he and set designer Jan Versweyveld imagined a stupefying convention hall as the set—a spectacularly anonymous auditorium that could be in Washington, Sao Paolo, or Brussels—complete with omnipresent television monitors , fake Swedish sofas, computers, a newsroom, green plants, a bar, conference tables, and cameramen” (Program notes, Tragédies Romaines, Festival TransAmériques ).
- 11.
Please note that I am using here a 2002 translation of these paragraphs by Ken Knabb, whose alternative wording I prefer to the 1983 translation published by Black & Red.
- 12.
Willinger suggestively notes that “Van Hove started using classics, whose characters are invariably royals, as a mechanism for exploring the position of the modern administrator at the top of the bureaucratic food chain as early as his 1988 production of Schiller’s Don Carlos ” (105).
- 13.
The political roles played by mass media and the popular or populist have greatly altered between the time an earlier version of this chapter was written and the present moment. Then, the popular or populist seemed fairly equally divided between right and left in America (think, e.g., of the split between the Tea Party on the right and the advocates of Occupy on the left), and generally “progressive” in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East, with “mass media ” tilting either far to the right or straddling the center. Now, populism is almost entirely identified with right-wing authoritarian nationalists, ranging from America to Austria, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, and Turkey, and mass media outlets like the Sinclair Broadcast Group and Murdoch-owned newspapers and cable networks, with other media outlets—MSNBC , CNN , The Washington Post , and The New York Times —serving (along with legislators representing the Democratic party in the United States) as the last defense of liberal values and constitutionally guaranteed legal rights.
- 14.
A trailer and video clip of this production are available on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/72645451 and https://vimeo.com/47005242, respectively. Accessed August 8, 2018.
- 15.
As Pascale Aebischer writes of the live-relay filming of a different stage event, given “the laws governing ‘the real’ in present-day culture, [t]he very fact that the performance was being filmed suggested to the viewers that it was worth filming because it was unique. The act of remediation validated the liveness of the event” (2017, 306).
- 16.
The program note, which is subtitled “Ivo van Hove on Roman Tragedies” in the BAM program for 16–18 November 2012, begins in the following manner: “Roman Tragedies is a polyphonic theatre production in which all opinions, standpoints and opinions exist side by side. A piece that does not aim to make an ultimate statement about who has right on his side or which direction we should take. Shakespeare does not take sides either. With the Roman tragedies he wrote three plays which revolve around politics and its mechanisms. Without prejudices or partisan standpoints he shows how people who believe in political ideas or systems debate with each other. He shows how they succeed or fail in their political aims. He shows that politics is made by people.” See the online version at http://www.tga.nl/en/productions/romeinse-tragedies/synopsis. Accessed August 8, 2018. The program note appears newly-translated by Isabelle Groenhof as an entry authored by van Hove in Bennett and Massai (2018, 56–59).
- 17.
Barker would likely disagree, stressing as she does the realism of van Hove’s portraiture, which uncovers significance “precisely by depicting Antony and Cleopatra as lacking in heroic composure and grandeur” (2017, 58). I would answer that realism is built into Shakespeare’s own romantic conception of the lovers, that they are scripted as being most in order when out of order, and that van Hove is reinforcing standardized ways of depicting their relationship rather than departing from them. In the process, he also predictably displaces politics as the preserve of cold, sexless individuals like Octavius. Willinger helps explain this displacement when noting that “Van Hove divides all dramatic literature as a stacking up between ‘family drama’ or ‘history plays’ … Indeed, he reduces many classical plays to their family armature, subtracting or minimizing the historical pattern. His latest idea, that history plays will problematize leadership itself, again brings potentially expansive political tropes to a microcosmic dimension of the personal” (103).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Copyright information
© 2019 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Cartelli, T. (2019). High-Tech Shakespeare in a Mediatized Globe: Ivo van Hove’s Roman Tragedies and the Problem of Spectatorship. In: Reenacting Shakespeare in the Shakespeare Aftermath. Reproducing Shakespeare. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40482-4_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-40482-4_7
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-40481-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-40482-4
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)