The latest edition of Vogue hits the stands this week, containing a story I did on John Bell and the 20th anniversary of the Bell Shakespeare Company.
See http://www.vogue.com.au/vogue+magazine
He was terrific to meet in person, having seen him on stage so many times. He was fairly laid-back and quiet when we spoke but very generous and engaging.
Here is a snippet of the transcript of my interview with him, conducted on a hot day in December in a courtyard outside his office in The Rocks.
V: You’ve chosen King Lear as the corner stone of your 20th anniversary year. Why that role?
JB: It’s pretty much the only one left I can do. I am 70 next year and it had to be a big one, a blockbuster and I can’t do Hamlet anymore and I am the wrong colour for Othello. What is there left? I have done it twice before. It’s a nice 20th anniversary statement, to do it again. It will be touring all the capital cities. It’s a big statement about the company and where we are at.
V: I guess the audience will be full of 70 year old men pondering the nature of aging and so forth, what it means to retire but also to worry about the next generation. Lots of modern themes.
JB: When I have performed the role before those issues didn’t really come to the forefront of my brain but now they are very much at the forefront - what it’s like getting older, giving up your authority, preparing for the next generation? I’ve got two daughters so I’ve been through all that. The role means many different things now to me than it did ten years ago and ten years again. The play does change in one’s head quite radically.
V: When you are thinking about trying to give Shakespeare a modern interpretation, is there a limit or criteria for this?
JB: The sky’s the limit as long as you’re doing it with some talent and some tact. It is easy to say ‘we’ll set it in a pizza parlour’ but the question is why and what does it mean to the audience? It’s pretty fashionable to be wacky with the classics but that can be very empty unless there is a good rationale for it. I think the thing is not to squeeze it into one frame – [the plays] are wider than that and have more connotations.
V: Over the decades that you’ve be involved in Shakespeare, have you noticed any trends or changes in how young actors coming out of acting school feel and approach the bard?
JB: The trouble is they don’t actually do enough at drama school to get familiar with it. They might do one Shakespeare play in three years but that is not enough. When they get out, some of them have a real hunger and aptitude for it, others are floundering a bit but we take a lot of them into our Actors At Work scheme that plays in the schools. They play three shows a day in schools for a whole year and by the end of that they certainly know how to do Shakespeare, the crowd control, the storytelling, they get the language clear. Peter O’Toole said you don’t get good at Shakespeare until after ten years. There is some truth to that. It has to become second nature, a second language. That’s why this company is important because it allows actors to do Shakespeare again and again and revisit the same parts. I have done King Lear three times, Macbeth twice, Prospero three times. Opera singers and musicians get a chance to develop a repertoire and actors don’t always get that chance.
V: Is it the same too of audiences, getting to see Shakespeare regularly and getting used to the language and so on?
JB: I think that’s true, although there can be a danger of too much Shakespeare. I think last week there were ten Shakespeare plays on – at the park, at the beach and so on. When we started this company Shakespeare wasn’t being done all that much and now smaller groups and co-ops and other companies are now doing it. I think we have encouraged a growth industry. It’s proved how popular it can be. And that’s because from the beginning we insisted on doing it in modern dress, with Australian voices. We weren’t going to try to imitate the English way of doing it. That doesn’t seem like a big deal now but back then it was a shock to audiences to see it done that way. That has been broken open and now we can see all the things we can do with it.
For tickets and more information about Bell’s birthday celebrations see:
http://www.bellshakespeare.com.au/
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