Two Noble Kinsmen stuff
Dec. 2nd, 2014 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
a_t_rainSo, over Thanksgiving weekend my parents and I went to see ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
cisic's excellent production of Two Noble Kinsmen at the Anacostia Arts Center. This was an almost-last first time for me (there are only two more Shakespeare plays that I have never seen on stage, and one of them, 2 Henry IV, I've seen in so many film and video versions that it doesn't seem to count). It's also one of the very few Shakespeare plays that I don't know very well at all, but do know the source material really, really well (in fact, I think it's the only one for which both of these things are true).
OK, so one of the things that immediately struck me was just how different the story becomes once Palamon and Arcite are actually embodied by actors with a tangible physical presence and personality. Because part of the point in Chaucer is how so very much alike they are, and I think we're meant to read the ending as essentially arbitrary, a compromise struck by divine powers for whom human beings are little more than pieces on a playing board to be moved around at will. (My yet-and-possibly-forever-unpublished essay on TKT is all about this.) When they're on stage, they inevitably have to become individuals. And Arcite, in this production, was charming -- palpably smaller, younger, and cheerier than Palamon, forever moving about and coaxing his cousin out of his broodiness, pouring out glasses of wine for the man with whom he's about to fight a duel with the evident hope that maybe this could somehow be avoided, but anyway, best to take our pleasure while it lasts. (Some of these are obviously choices particular to this production, but very much grounded in the text.) Anyway, Arcite's sheer likeability really brought home the unfairness of it all, a totally different flavor of unfairness than exists in Chaucer.
(It also occurs to me -- since, as you'll gather from my last post, I can't resist biographical speculation in my private Shakespeare-musings, even though I would never do it in scholarship -- that Shakespeare would have lost all three of his younger brothers within the space of a very few years prior to writing this play. I wonder if "his" Arcite, who is very much not the one we get in Chaucer, is an elegy for one or more of them.)
Also deeply unfair is the choice the play forces on Emilia, who is constantly being asked to pick one man with the understanding that the other one is going to be executed, and then, when she quite understandably refuses, put in the position of being the grand prize in a contest where the loser AND ALL OF HIS FRIENDS get executed. (This, also, is very different from Chaucer, where there aren't supposed to be any deaths in the tournament.) I think this production did a very good job bringing out the sheer awfulness of this, and the ways that Theseus's sudden "hey, let's have a happy ending" announcement (in the absence of the "processe and lengthe of certeyne yeres" of Chaucer's version) is profoundly problematic. (I don't always like productions that undo happy endings that are in the text, but it worked here.)
Finally: There are a LOT of works of literature in which everyone's problems could be solved by just-having-a-threesome-already, but none more so than this one. (OK, maybe a foursome with the Jailer's Daughter. Actually, I kind of suspect that Emilia might be more into the Jailer's Daughter than she is into either of the young men.)
cisic's excellent production of Two Noble Kinsmen at the Anacostia Arts Center. This was an almost-last first time for me (there are only two more Shakespeare plays that I have never seen on stage, and one of them, 2 Henry IV, I've seen in so many film and video versions that it doesn't seem to count). It's also one of the very few Shakespeare plays that I don't know very well at all, but do know the source material really, really well (in fact, I think it's the only one for which both of these things are true).OK, so one of the things that immediately struck me was just how different the story becomes once Palamon and Arcite are actually embodied by actors with a tangible physical presence and personality. Because part of the point in Chaucer is how so very much alike they are, and I think we're meant to read the ending as essentially arbitrary, a compromise struck by divine powers for whom human beings are little more than pieces on a playing board to be moved around at will. (My yet-and-possibly-forever-unpublished essay on TKT is all about this.) When they're on stage, they inevitably have to become individuals. And Arcite, in this production, was charming -- palpably smaller, younger, and cheerier than Palamon, forever moving about and coaxing his cousin out of his broodiness, pouring out glasses of wine for the man with whom he's about to fight a duel with the evident hope that maybe this could somehow be avoided, but anyway, best to take our pleasure while it lasts. (Some of these are obviously choices particular to this production, but very much grounded in the text.) Anyway, Arcite's sheer likeability really brought home the unfairness of it all, a totally different flavor of unfairness than exists in Chaucer.
(It also occurs to me -- since, as you'll gather from my last post, I can't resist biographical speculation in my private Shakespeare-musings, even though I would never do it in scholarship -- that Shakespeare would have lost all three of his younger brothers within the space of a very few years prior to writing this play. I wonder if "his" Arcite, who is very much not the one we get in Chaucer, is an elegy for one or more of them.)
Also deeply unfair is the choice the play forces on Emilia, who is constantly being asked to pick one man with the understanding that the other one is going to be executed, and then, when she quite understandably refuses, put in the position of being the grand prize in a contest where the loser AND ALL OF HIS FRIENDS get executed. (This, also, is very different from Chaucer, where there aren't supposed to be any deaths in the tournament.) I think this production did a very good job bringing out the sheer awfulness of this, and the ways that Theseus's sudden "hey, let's have a happy ending" announcement (in the absence of the "processe and lengthe of certeyne yeres" of Chaucer's version) is profoundly problematic. (I don't always like productions that undo happy endings that are in the text, but it worked here.)
Finally: There are a LOT of works of literature in which everyone's problems could be solved by just-having-a-threesome-already, but none more so than this one. (OK, maybe a foursome with the Jailer's Daughter. Actually, I kind of suspect that Emilia might be more into the Jailer's Daughter than she is into either of the young men.)
