09/08/2026
There was a night, during previews of a play I wrote called Changeling: A Grand Guignol for Murderous Times, when I think the soul of the entire enterprise escaped from its bottle.
The play is a wholesale demolition and reconstruction of Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s The Changeling, which we reimagined as something approaching the Three Stooges after several unfortunate encounters with a blood bank. We used blood. Considerable quantities of it. During one performance the actor playing De Flores, the play’s antagonist, ended up marinated in the stuff. He was covered from head to toe.
I retained a line from the original play where the protagonist confronts De Flores and points out that there is a little blood on his collar. De Flores replies that it is only a little from shaving.
Think about the image for a moment. A man is drenched in what appears to be somebody else’s blood and when challenged about it he responds, with the casual dignity of a man discussing his morning ablutions, that he nicked himself shaving.
It was hilarious.
It was also horrible.
More importantly, it was both at the same time.
I thought it was the best thing in the production. The director disagreed and made certain it never happened again on the grounds that the moment was gratuitous. This has always seemed to me a dangerous word in theatre. “Gratuitous” can mean unnecessary, certainly. It can also mean that someone has discovered the thing that makes the scene interesting. That willingness to allow a scene to become funny at the precise moment when it ought also to be horrifying seems to me central to a particular theatrical spirit. Shakespeare possessed it in industrial quantities. We have spent much of the last century teaching ourselves not to notice.
I say this because I have been looking at the Shakespeare productions surrounding me here in Canada, and Canada has inherited an Edwardian relationship with Shakespeare. The productions tend to approach the plays as though they have arrived from heaven in a velvet box and we have been entrusted with the solemn responsibility of not dropping them. There is a great deal of reverence. There is a great deal of weight. There is, often, a pleasant amount of tripping on the tongue.
Then there is the American contribution, which arrives carrying a psychological excavation kit. The American theatrical tradition has developed an understandable enthusiasm for psychological realism, with the result that actors are often encouraged to discover the secret interior life of a character somewhere beneath the script, beneath the scene, beneath the floorboards and, if possible, beneath the foundations of the theatre itself. This becomes interesting with Shakespeare because there is a genuine historical argument lurking underneath the whole business. Did early modern writers and audiences understand character interiority in the same way we do? The question remains contested in Shakespeare scholarship.
Francis Barker and Catherine Belsey, among others, have argued that the interiority of figures such as Hamlet may function as theatrical display. The character presents interiority rather than possessing the psychological coherent inner machinery that modern productions assume. The effect is gestural, theatrical, public.
Katharine Maus has challenged this position, arguing that early modern writers worried about the distinction between inward disposition and outward appearance. Renaissance literature is full of people wondering whether another person’s face, words, and behaviour correspond to what is happening inside them. To dismiss Renaissance interiority as something invented by modern psychology would therefore be premature. I have no intention of settling several centuries of literary scholarship in the middle of a theatre essay. That way lies either a tenure appointment or a long evening.
This point is narrower. A production that behaves as though Shakespeare’s characters possess modern psychological interiority as an unquestionable fact has made an interpretive choice. A production that behaves as though they possess none has also made an interpretive choice. Either can be interesting. Neither should pretend that it has discovered the objective truth.
What interests me is Shakespeare’s actual dramatic machinery. His characters tell us what they think. When they lie, Shakespeare will tell us that they are lying in an aside. When they scheme, they explain the scheme. When they change their minds, they are forthcoming about the change. Shakespeare does not make us sit in the audience for forty-five minutes while we reconstruct the protagonist’s childhood trauma from the way he holds a teacup. That tells us something about the dramatic technique. It does not tell us whether Elizabethans had inner lives. This distinction matters.
Britain sits somewhere between these two tendencies. West End and Royal Shakespeare Company productions are often beautifully acted and technically accomplished, hovering between American psychological naturalism and a more presentational English tradition. They are good. The trouble is that they are often not alive. They often feel stale; but a kind of stale that is a good night out.
Globe productions have moved further toward acknowledging the audience. The actors perform for the people watching them, and that simple fact can produce a different theatrical electricity. But the psychological strain keeps finding its way through the back door, carrying a respectable-looking handbag.
I encountered the alternative again while rereading Henry VI, Part 1 for this series. Act One, Scene Two gives us the Dauphin being comically dismantled by Joan la Pucelle before he has finished testing her. Then comes Act One, Scene Three, which may be one of the great, overlooked, pieces of theatrical nonsense in the canon. Gloucester storms into the Tower of London and discovers that his great-uncle, the Bishop of Wi******er, has already installed himself there to control the young king. The two men begin insulting each other. Officers intervene. The Lord Mayor of London gets dragged into the affair. Everyone is furious. The scene resembles a street brawl organised by people who have been informed that they are members of the aristocracy and have chosen to interpret this as a personal insult.
Reading it, I kept thinking: this is a clown scene. In fact, an astonishing amount of Shakespeare is a clown scene.
We have somehow become so frightened of Shakespeare’s cultural importance that we forget that he appears to have enjoyed people behaving like idiots.
The BBC’s 1983 production of the complete Henry VI cycle, directed by Jane Howell, understood this better than almost any Shakespeare production I have encountered. Howell and designer Oliver Bayldon staged all four plays, the three parts of Henry VI and Richard III, on one set designed as a kind of children’s adventure playground. The production is full of bright primary colours, platforms, catwalks, and artificial structures. Nothing pretended to be an authentic medieval castle. Nothing whispered, “We spent eighteen months researching the masonry of fifteenth-century Warwickshire.” The artificiality is the point.
As the cycle progresses and England collapses into the Wars of the Roses, the playground itself deteriorates. The bright colours darken. The world becomes charred and oppressive. By Richard III, the playground has become a nightmare.
In the first, still-colourful Henry VI, Part 1, Gloucester and Wi******er threaten one another while riding rocking horses.
Rocking horses.
These are powerful noblemen in the middle of a vicious political struggle, and they are sitting on children’s toys while having a tantrum. It is one of the most delightful images I know in Shakespeare on screen because it understands something that solemn productions miss. Their childishness is not an embarrassment that the director needs to conceal. Their childishness is the scene.
The American Conservatory Theater’s 1976 production of The Taming of the Shrew, directed by William Ball and later broadcast on PBS, made a similar decision with a different play. Ball staged the production as commedia dell’arte, embracing slapstick, stock-character logic, physical comedy, and the sheer theatrical indecency of the thing.
The result moves.
It is fast. It is funny. It is physical. It does not spend its entire running time apologising for the fact that The Taming of the Shrew contains material which might make a modern audience uncomfortable. That discomfort remains. Of course it does. But the production understands that one can confront an ugly or difficult element of a play without embalming the rest of it.
In Canada, calling a Shakespeare production “juvenile” or “silly” functions as a devastating criticism. It means the company has failed to understand the profundity of the material. Someone, somewhere, has not taken Shakespeare seriously enough.
I think we have the hierarchy upside down. When I worked with actors on classical text, I would tell them not to approach Shakespeare psychologically in the narrow modern sense. Again, I did not mean that the characters have no psychology. I meant that the actor should stop treating every line as a cryptic archaeological fragment from which the audience must reconstruct an invisible private life. Shakespeare gives you the thought. Play the thought. Then give the audience the next one.
For this reason, I often pointed actors toward Theatre for Young Audiences as a model.
This may sound insulting to Shakespeare until you have watched good Theatre for Young Audiences. It is the hardest theatre to do well.
Children possess a remarkable and terrifying honesty. An adult audience will sit through a bad performance for a long time. Adults have jobs. They have social conventions. They have been trained to clap. They may even have paid for parking.
Children have no such obligations. If they are bored, they will tell you. Sometimes they will tell you collectively. Sometimes they will tell you in the middle of the scene. Sometimes they will begin discussing something else at a volume that makes it clear the production has lost its territorial claim over the room.
That forces the actor to engage. There is nowhere to hide behind dignity. When actors made that leap with Shakespeare, something extraordinary happened. The language became energetic. The jokes landed. The audience responded. People stopped enduring Shakespeare and started watching him. That is the spirit I recognise in the De Flores moment.
A man covered in blood says he has cut himself shaving. It is ridiculous. It is appalling. It is funny.
The laughter makes the violence worse, and the violence makes the laughter worse. The two things feed each other. The scene acquires the peculiar electrical charge that occurs when an audience suddenly discovers that it does not know whether it should laugh. That is theatre.
I suspect it is also one of the things we have disciplined out of Shakespeare. We have decided that certain plays are too important to behave badly. I would like to see what happens when we stop.
I would like to see Hamlet treated with the kind of dangerous comic energy that lives inside Henry VI. I would like to see Lear allowed to become grotesque and absurd before anyone rushes in to make it profound. I would like Macbeth to remember that Shakespeare’s theatre could be funny about murder, blood, ghosts, ambition, and people making poor decisions.
Romeo and Juliet may need the most violent intervention of all. That play has become so reverent that it has nearly stopped breathing. We have turned two teenagers making an appalling series of decisions into the patron saints of tasteful romantic suffering. Shakespeare gives us b***y jokes, incompetent adults, adolescent stupidity, sudden violence, s*x, death, and an extraordinary amount of people behaving badly. We give him moonlight and tasteful music.
I keep wondering what would happen if we took the clownish, childlike spirit that makes the Henry VI scenes so alive, and the ACT Shrew so shameless, and released it into Romeo and Juliet. I do not know exactly what that production would look like.
That is the point. I would like to find out
