One of the goals of festivals such as Bard on the Beach is the promotion of the works of William Shakespeare. This is promotion not from obscurity, but from the negative association so many link with his name — so often related to the difficulty or perceived inaccessibility of his texts.
One can only applaud such goals. Shakespeare, perhaps more than any other literary figure in history, has too often suffered the groans of kids in school who see him only as a laborious chore, the barrier to a good mark or an easy semester. Most are introduced to him at an early age, and the only remnant they retain of a Shakespearean education is the difficulty of his text. Many adults will surely have similar memories and complaints.
The reason why this happens varies, though much of the reaction can be linked to how Shakespeare is taught in school. This is where festivals like Bard on the Beach are meant to help. Show Shakespeare in a setting other than a classroom, and his greatness can be more easily pinpointed, free from the pressures of getting a good grade.
This year’s Bard on the Beach certainly has the plays to achieve this goal. King Lear, ranked among Shakespeare’s best, touches on emotions that stick long after its end — which is a reason so many struggle to read it or act it. Every generation has found something different in it, something else to remember from it, from the difficulties of aging to the pangs of unreturned love or the forgotten cruelty a child can levy on their parent.
Love’s Labour’s Lost, a much lighter and more comical play, is a personal favourite. Its central theme is whether the pursuit of study can be seen as so noble that its students are willing to forgo youthful love for it.
Another comedy to be performed at this year’s festival is The Comedy of Errors. If the title seems familiar it is because the phrase itself, like so many of Shakespeare’s lines, has entered our general lexicon permanently. The play is one of Shakespeare’s earliest, but the language and humour is so inviting that, like King Lear and Love’s Labour’s Lost, it counteracts the image of a boring and unexciting Shakespeare.
Moving away from plays written by Shakespeare, and in a list of delights one can expect from Bard on the Beach, is Shakespeare’s Rebel. This stage adaptation of C.C. Humphrey’s successful novel follows the life of John Lawley, a man stuck in the centre of the politically revolutionary fervour of Elizabethan England. Among Lawley’s many goals, he wants to continue his job as a fight choreographer for the plays of Shakespeare.
The larger context of the play also helps to shed light on another aspect of Shakespeare: as universal as his plays and characters are, they also had something to say about the age he lived in, a fact this play highlights in between inspired duel scenes and exciting glimpses of a past era.
Shakespeare’s greatness lies in his ability to articulate your own thoughts and feelings better than you could. Whatever joys or woes colour your life, there is a brilliant passage from Shakespeare related to it. To read his works is to find a collection of characters, to borrow a line from his friend and contemporary Ben Jonson, “rammed with life.” If Bard on the Beach can do something to display this, then they will have achieved their goal.
