Abstract
No review of Shakespeare on European Festival Stages, published in the early months of 2022, could ignore the irony of discussing Europe at this fraught historical moment. Little could the book's contributors have envisioned how their analyses of European festival stages – progeny of the ‘catastrophic first half of the twentieth century’ (p. 3) – would be impacted by 2022's own catastrophe, Russia's attack on Ukraine, just as Europe willed itself into short-lived post-pandemic optimism. While the book is dedicated to the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival founder Jerzy Limon, who died in 2021, this review is dedicated to the children, women, and men of Ukraine whose lives remain devastated by war.
Describing their work as ‘both pan-European and post-English’ (p. 4), Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Florence March, and Paul Prescott deny any Brexit-vote contemporaneity, despite their exclusion of UK festivals (p. 5). Invited instead to ‘decentre “English Shakespeare”’, their essayists focus on ‘nearly every active member’ of the 2010-founded European Shakespeare Festivals Network (p. 5). Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, and Spain are represented, their combined festivals, to quote Isabel Guerrero, embodying ‘binge theatre’ at its best (p. 44). Readers learn that the ‘festivalization’ these countries accommodate – whereby ‘stages’ and ‘places’ are ‘locked in a relationship that can be symbiotic and/or dialectical’ (p. 10) – lead likewise to ‘off-festival’ events that add enormously to Shakespeare's localised and pan-cultural appeal (p. 11).
Inevitably, several chapters invite comparison between festivals staged in ‘pre-existing historical spaces’ (p. 10), and those ‘pseudo-historical’ constructs (p. 11) that dominate twenty-first-century Shakespeare performance scholarship. Neither pre-existing nor pseudo-historical ‘museums’, southern France's Avignon, Montpellier, and Nice festivals, Florence March argues, are actually ‘open laboratories’ which ‘show theatre in the making and generate new modes of spectating’ (p. 32), while highlighting Shakespeare's role as a ‘catalyst for creativity, a factor of social cohesion and a vector of emancipation’ (p. 27). In contrast, the strange adaptation of a pre-existing historical space informs Anne Sophie Refskou's account of HamletScenen, staged at Kronborg castle in Helsingør, Denmark, since 2008. Although Kronborg has hosted Shakespeare productions for over a century, its Anglo-Hamletian associations guarantee the festival's international fame, not least because ‘Elsinore and Copenhagen’ remain the ‘only Danish cities to boast an English version of their names’ (p. 206). Unlike records that show English actors performing during Shakespeare's lifetime in the Czech Republic and Slovakia (p. 57), Germany (p. 76), and Poland (p. 138), no evidence exists for Denmark, a fact that heightens, in Refskou's opinion, the inherent pseudo-historicity of the festival's ultra-historical location.
Less determined by pseudo-historical specificity, the 1988 ‘replica of the Globe Theatre’ in Neuss, Germany, is discussed by Vanessa Schormann (p. 75). Flatteringly employing the term ‘Globolatry’ in her title – coined by this reviewer in his 2018 Shakespeare Bulletin article about Emma Rice – Schormann confirms how the Neuss Globe is ‘neither exactly a cultural heritage site’ nor a ‘tourist attraction’, but a ‘modern idea of Shakespeare's Globe, with no intention of being architecturally or historically correct’ (p. 78). Similarly, Lisanna Calvi and Maddalena Pennacchia discuss the 2003-founded Silvano Toti Globe Theatre in Rome, which, although ‘conceptually related’ to ‘many Elizabethan-like venues around the world’, differs ‘because it presents very strong local peculiarities, Italian and Roman’, in its ‘shared artistic’ production style, its Summer Season relying on a ‘purposeful quoting and recycling of Italian Renaissance art’, ‘live popular music and folk dancing’, and an ‘improvising acting tradition that goes back to the commedia dell’arte’ (p. 129).
The Silvano Toti Globe's Italocentric recycling of localised heritages invites comparison with the Gdańsk Shakespeare Festival's versatile space, as discussed by Urszula Kizelbach and Jacek Fabiszak. Although equally Globe-like in its sensitivities, Poland's 1993-founded setting accommodates ‘state-of-the-art technology’ and a ‘protean stage’ that ‘easily transforms into an Elizabethan platform, a theatre-in-the-round or the classical black box’ (p. 141). Similarly, as Alexandra Portmann explains, Serbia's 2014-founded Itaka Shakespeare Festival, with its focus on ‘new approaches’ to Shakespeare, ‘transforms’ its drama into a ‘communicative foil for transcultural exchanges and a fruitful platform for cultural, social and political questioning’ (p. 223). Given Itaka Shakespeare Festival's relative newness, such ‘questioning’ guarantees that ‘controversial discourses have the potential to be actualized’ – notably the ‘feminist critique’ about the ‘visibility of female authors and directors’ – such actualisation predating the #MeToo movement's global recognition (pp. 225–6).
Regardless of the re-historicised or replicated materiality of Europe's festival spaces, the significance of historical trauma as a prerequisite for festivalisation is nonetheless evident from chapters that reference post-Second World War welfare interventionism and ‘premeditated manufacture of civility’ (p. 6), all founded on an ‘optimistic vision’ of Shakespeare's ‘healing and peace-making’ power (p. 8). Calvi and Pennacchia's description of Verona, for example, relates the festival's very existence to local authority determination to ‘rebuild not only the city's economic and civic configuration but also its cultural identity’ in post-fascist Italy (p. 120). Fascism's impact on creativity is likewise referenced by Guerrero when noting the 1978 arrival of the Almagro festivals, made possible by the death of Franco and the ‘beginning of democracy’ in Spain (p. 40).
Another historical trauma relates to the collapse of Iron Curtain Communism and the 1989 fall of the Soviet Union. Filip Krajník and Eva Kyselová, when discussing the 1990 Prague Castle open-air production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, describe how the play's ‘fantasy’ that ‘turns into reality’ mirrored the newfound political freedom experienced by Czech citizens (p. 55). Similarly, Júlia Paraizs and Ágnes Matuska discuss the 2005 accession of Hungary to the European Union, and how the Gyula Shakespeare Festival illustrated the nation's ‘strong interest’ in subsequently ‘exploring its twentieth-century post-Soviet past’ through Shakespeare's plays (p. 184). In contrast, Nicoleta Cinpoeş references the collapse of Ceauşescu's regime in 1989, and the 1994 creation of the Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, while noting Shakespeare's importance to Romania not only after, but also during the Soviet era. Under Ceauşescu's rule, when ‘reality’ was ‘rewritten, contemporary voices gagged or exiled and spectators turned into “mute audiences”’, Shakespeare's plays ‘provided a lifeline and a language for survival, one even the censors could not ban for being anti-regime’ (p. 96).
Post-Soviet democratic governance, which opened the gates to Western commercial interests, was not always viewed positively by creative enterprises used to state-subsidised control. Bulgaria's ‘post-communist theatre’, for example, on being ‘dismantled’ and ‘starved of funding’, faced the ‘predicament’, Boika Sokolova and Kirilka Stavreva argue, of being ‘thrown’ to the ‘dogs of consumerism’ (p. 161). Consequently, and representing a grass-roots anti-capitalist response to Bulgarian theatre's decline into commercial oblivion, the 1999-founded Patalenitsa Shakespeare festival was born. For a nation suffering the ‘blight of rampant capitalism, unemployment, the unravelling of systems of social provision’, including education and healthcare, ‘funding for the arts and a general loss of moral compass’ (p. 161), the emergence of a truly ‘Open Theatre’ festival (p. 165) provided a ‘corrective to surges of [post-Soviet] social despair’ (p. 170).
As this review suggests, Shakespeare on European Festival Stages offers a comprehensive exploration of festivals impacted by COVID-19 and vulnerable to instability in Europe. Indeed, Kizelbach and Fabiszak's description of Maja Kleczewska's Polish-Ukrainian ‘Hamlet/Гамлет,’ included in the 2019 pre-COVID Gdansk season, in hindsight seems prescient given the production's overt representation of the ‘end of Western civilization’ (p. 151). Featuring Fortinbras as a multicultural ‘invader from outside,’ whose entrance into ‘the ruins of Europe’ (p. 151) encapsulated populist fears of unchecked migration fuelled by replacement-theory paranoia, Kleczewska's Hamlet predates and evokes the real-life invasion of Ukraine and subsequent mass migration to escape the horrors of war. This excellent book reminds us of past societal fragilities, of present dangers, and of Shakespeare's future potential as a creative conduit for hope, healing, and reconciliation.