In the midst of the Battle of the Lears series, it seems appropriate to review Propellor’s version of The Winter’s Tale. The Shakespeare’s company award winning director Edward Hall perfectly communicates Charles Marowitz’s belief that:
The modern director is the master of the subtext as surely as the author is of the text, and his dominion includes every nuance and allusion transmitted in each moment of the performance. He is not simply a person who imposes order upon artistic subordinates in order to express a writer’s meaning, but someone who challenges the assumptions of a work of art and uses mise-en-scène actively to pit his beliefs against those of the play. Without that confrontation, that sense of challenge, true direction cannot take place, for unless the author’s work is engaged on an intellectual level equal to his own, the play is merely transplanted from one medium to another – a process which contradicts the definition of the word ‘perform’ – which means to ‘carry on to the finish’, to ‘accomplish’, to fulfil the cycle of creativity begun by the author. (Marowitz 3)
Before the performance begins, Hall challenges the audience by directing an all male, and might I add adult, company. Propellor’s all male cast may be fulfilling ‘the cycle of creativity begun by the author’ by inviting a comparison to the Jacobean theatre company, The King’s Men (formerly the Lord Chamberlain’s men), who performed The Winter’s Tale in Whitehall’s Banqueting House in 1612-13. The play was one of fourteen celebrating the wedding of King James I’s daughter Elizabeth to Prince Frederick the Elector Palatine (Orgel 80). Although Shakespeare’s theatre company used boys in the female leads, Propellor -Continue reading>
