A quick Google search crowns A Midsummer’s Night Dream as Shakespeare’s most popular play. I hated it, but that may also have just been because of secondary school. Give me Romeo & Juliet any day. More specifically, give me the 1996 film adaptation: seeing the costumes, music, and acting, Baz Luhrmann clearly understood his brief. But, with the news of yet another adaption of Romeo and Juliet, this time from the National Theatre with Romeo as a single dad and Juliet reinvented as Julie who has ambitions of Cambridge, it is time to ask: what about the Bard’s other works?
37 – that’s the number of plays in the First Folio, in case you ever need it for a pub quiz. However, out of those 37, I could only name a handful my friends and I have read or seen. Although I love the plays I have seen in theatres, where are the performances of Timon of Athens or Troilus and Cressida? I’m not saying that Shakespeare is underrated (let’s face it, that would be pushing it), but I’m tired of seeing the same old adaptations of the same four or five plays.
In the years since Baz Luhrmann directed that epic version of Romeo and Juliet, we’ve had another film version: a musical adaptation & Juliet that ditches the original ending and transforms the love story into a feminist tale filled with hit songs and multiple ballet performances. It sells well. As long there is an audience for it, theatres will bank on sure-fire hits rather than take a risk on a play which hasn’t been dusted off in a while.
About ten years ago, New York Public Theater put on a musical production of Love’s Labour Lost. Reviews declare that the production pulls it off. I’d recommend the soundtrack. If you listen to only one song, ‘Rich People’ is perfect for our trying times. However, this production got a limited run because theatres won’t risk the money involved in running it for longer and not filling the theatre with audiences. So, this is my plea to the theatre to take a risk and show more of the plays that haven’t already been performed to death. Obscure source material can work wonders in the right hands. And a plea to audiences, if you like the theatre and you like Shakespeare, why not see a show where you don’t know how it ends beforehand?
It’s the 400th anniversary of the First Folio this month. Shakespeare’s works have revolutionised theatre for four centuries. May these plays – all of them – continue to do so for many more.
Image Credit: “First-page-first-folio-troilus-cressida” by William Shakespeare, Isaac Jaggard and Edward Blount (printers) is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.