Welcome to almost-Spoleto-season, Charleston. We’re expanding our pre-season coverage of Spoleto shows this year, giving you a taste of shows well in advance — both so you can snag tickets, and also so you can deep dive into your own research about each performance. Enjoy.
A family of refugees dig their toes into an adopted land. An anxious audience feels their way to their seats. Together they share the uncertainty of what story awaits them. This is the human condition that the renowned company from Shakespeare’s Globe hopes to expose as they allow Spoleto theatergoers to select one of three classic plays — just moments before it is to be performed.
“All three plays involve shipwrecks, and all three plays involve displacement and arriving on shores, and finding a sense of identity and finding out who you are,” says director Brendan O’Hea.
Returning to Spoleto, the Globe’s touring troupe will build upon the Shakespearean tradition of allowing each audience to select a performance from their traveling repertoire. This tour features a trio of choices — the comedic Twelfth Night, the bleak farce of Comedy of Errors, and the underperformed Pericles — all of which heavily feature protagonists unmoored from their home and all that they consider comfortable.
“We’re going through Brexit at the moment over here, so it’s in the air about, dare I say, becoming more isolationist or drawing up the bridges,” says O’Hea. “These plays are all about exploring one’s identity and how one adjusts to one’s otherness, arriving on foreign shores and how one copes with that. They feel very prescient. That’s what I’m excited about.”
Working with a predominantly international cast for this tour, O’Hea says the troupe includes a Lithuanian, American-Armenian, Australian, South African, as well as Irish and British actors. Well versed in the language of the Bard, O’Hea allows for each performer to bring something from their own culture, blending the music of each unique accent into a performance that speaks to the universality of Shakespeare’s work.
“I hope this group of plays show that no matter what country you are from, what gender you identify with, or what your religious beliefs are, there are similarities in everyone,” says actor Beau Holland, an Ireland native primarily working in England. “I hope these plays show we have more in common than our differences, and that even these we can learn from.”
On any given night during the troupe’s Spoleto run, Holland will find herself faced with inhabiting one of three possible roles. After the votes are cast as to which play will be performed that evening, Holland says she and the rest of the crew enter into a sort of collaboration with the audience. But, as Holland explains, every audience is different. Fortunately, she finds a sense of liberation in allowing them to steer the ship.
“On a normal build up to performing a play, all the actors must mentally go through the motions of the play and attend fight calls, singing rehearsal, and prop journeys for the show,” she says. “On the audience choice nights we will be doing this three times, so it’s far more information than our brains are used to taking in before a show. I’m hoping it will become second nature: it simply must!”
According to Holland, what is striking so far in the rehearsal room is what links all these roles together. Some characters want very different things, but most of the characters in these particular plays are lost and seeking connection.
For O’Hea, allowing the audience to select the show not only serves to engage viewers, but also appeals to the original nature of these plays’ performances. The entire cast and crew must launch directly into their work. There is a sense of mayhem and panic backstage, but they are making theater in the moment, communing with audiences to make a story together. The process is purely democratic, with no hierarchy in place to decide on the performance.
In Shakespeare’s day, he didn’t have an infinite audience from which to pull. People were not coming from all around the world to see these plays. He was forced to create something that appealed to everyone.
“He talked about class, and the country, and hierarchies. Because he knew he had to appeal to all those, that’s what kept his plays full and the theaters full. That’s why everybody finds something in those plays,” says O’Hea. “He doesn’t just give the poetry to the higher orders or the smart people. Some of the best poetry can come from, for want of a better word, the lower orders. I think that’s rather kind of wonderful really.”
And by reflecting society back on itself in this way, Shakespeare’s work is able to show us what we all share. In believing that Shakespeare is “for all time and for all people,” O’Hea acknowledges the contradictions in each character. Great lovers become murderers. Kings are riddled with self doubt. Honest men and women turn to scoundrels. But by examining the capacity for evil in us all, Shakespeare also exposes the good. Heroes are born. Sacrifices are made. Love is forged. And in many cases, someone without a country finds a home.
“These complications, there’s good in the bad and bad in the good,” says O’Hea. “And that, I am afraid, is what we are like as humans. We’re not wholly one or wholly the other.”
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