Propping Up Characters: Staging in the Classroom

                                     

                                                        

            Manal wraps herself in a white feather boa and teases Dan with one of the ends.  Tisha winds a long silver necklace around her head, like a crown. Chris and Nadia are tossing a blue ball between them.  Mali is experimenting with a bullwhip.  Welcome to our Shakespeare class, and another experiment in how to develop original insights into the bard’s plays.

            We are reading Cymbeline, one of those obscure Shakespearean plays that rarely make it into classrooms.  I like my students to have bragging rights, to be able to say to others (including teachers), “Oh, you don’t know Titus Andronicus” or Troilus and Cressida or Cymbeline? Well, let me tell you.”

            Today, staging will offer us original ways to interpret the play. Shakespeare’s works are spare in staging directions, and, as Robert Thomas Fallon writes in How to Enjoy Shakespeare, his plays are not fragile—as is clear from the two productions we consider:  the 1983 BBC and the 2014 Michael Almereyda film.  As Mali points out, “This is the story of ‘Snow White.’ An evil queen, a vulnerable virgin—instead of Disney dwarves, she has long-lost brothers, and she comes back from the dead.”

            We compare the opening scenes—the BBC production adheres strictly to the text and the costuming is Elizabethan—gowns, corrugated collars, swords.  The film is set in contemporary Britain—Cymbeline, the king, is the head of a motorcycle gang.  They wear leather jackets and carry AK-47 machine guns (at a phallic angle).  Shakespeare’s play is illuminated by both approaches—one focused more on the words, the other on visual and sound effects.

            Then we, as a class, dive into the props I’ve gathered at random from my house and office and rolled in in an overflowing crate:  all of the above, and masks, scissors, a large serving spoon, flashlight, toy crown.  The props chose me—not I, anticipating what might be “right” for use with Cymbeline.  In small groups, students choose a scene to stage with their props.

            There were two approaches—the literal, closer to the BBC interpretation, and the imaginative, like the film.  In one group, a student took the crown to portray the Evil Queen.  They gave a quill to the doctor, from whom she exacts poison (so she thinks) as symbolic of his writing prescriptions. The small blue ball went to Pisanio, the faithful servant who, as they put it, is like a dog fetching.  Except for the ball, this assignment seemed predictable and literal.  So I suggested that they change-up—reassign the props.  Take two, the Evil Queen gets the quill—because she wants to write the story: her son should marry Imogen, the Snow White figure.  The doctor gets the ball, because he will figuratively drop it—suspecting the Evil Queen, he gives her a non-fatal potion.  Pisanio, the faithful servant, is given the crown for his moral superiority to them all.  And so it went with that group, changing up the props to develop deeper insights into the characters.

            In another Shakespeare class, Adelina, who was sporting the white feather boa, was assigned the role of Cloten, the Evil Queen’s son—the one she wanted to marry off to Imogen, Cymbeline’s daughter.  That was a surprise!  Actually, Adelina just wanted to play with the boa—but we went with it.  And found a way to make this staging experiment meaningful.  Further into the play, Cloten, who is a sullen minion of his mother, unexpectedly takes up a weapon and, in a parody of masculine bravado, challenges one of Imogen’s “dwarves.”  What we interpreted from the use of the boa, was that the Evil Queen made her son effeminate.  He dies in the attempt to assert domination, because he was unprepared for warfare.

            Every part of a Shakespearean poem or play can be used as an entry point for original interpretation.  Some of the more famous one’s include “Exit, pursued by a bear” from The Winter’s Tale; [Makes a pass through the arras], when Hamlet kills Polonius—the arras serving as a symbol for the veils of deceit in the play; and the numerous times in Cymbeline, “[Enter Queen]”—the one who is trying to write the story her way. 

            This was a lesson, for all of us, in how mere literal interpretations dull us out, and how staging—in this case props—can offer us new and intriguing engagements with Shakespeare’s characters.