I've never much cared for cinematic adaptations of Shakespeare, as this article makes clear. But I think it's one of my better pieces.

Shakespeare in Translation

A crew of square-jawed, all-American heroes set their spaceship down on an alien planet. They meet a cute robot called Robbie and a stunningly beautiful blonde. They discover a massive underground city built by aliens called the Krels and fight a lethal invisible monster… Perfect as the plot for a cheesy ‘50s sci-fi classic – Forbidden Planet (1956) – but as the template for one of cinema’s finest versions of Shakespeare? Surely not?

It’s all a question of adaptation. Now let’s just stop right there and consider what we mean by that term. All too often, adaptations are judged by that dread question: “Is it faithful to the book or play it’s based on?” By which is meant, does the film follow the letter of the plot, feature the same characters and portray them as imagined by the reader? If so, all that has been achieved is a “transfer”. It’s like moving house – the same people, the same objects, the same lives, just at a different address. Nicholas Ray once famously remarked, “If it were all in the script, why make the film?” for which a modern paraphrase might be, “If it were all in the book, why make the adaptation?” No, an adaptation is a much more complex undertaking. It demands that a work of art specifically tailored and constructed to work in one medium should now work in another. It requires the adaptor to rethink not just how the content is presented but how it is formed.

Given that’s the case, Shakespeare presents particular problems. Firstly, he wrote for theatre, where the action is concentrated in one location – the stage – and dialogue forms its structure. So successive film directors have felt the need to open the plays out by varying the scenery – Kenneth Branagh’s sunny Tuscany-set Much Ado About Nothing (1993) being a good example. But ultimately, this is just replacing a painted backdrop with a real one – the play’s essence is unchanged and, on film, still feels too “talky”. There’s also the fact that this is not contemporary but centuries-old theatre, for which the social and political contexts have disappeared and become largely obscure. So we get that pudding most beloved of modern directors, the “modernisation”. Oh, look it’s Richard III as a Nazi, Romeo and Juliet as street-gang kids in LA – how clever, how relevant. It’s that GCSE approach to literature, which now infects our educational and media establishments, that misses the fact that “relevancy” is not exclusive to specific times and places but also comes from universal stories that belong to all. By ignoring, for example, the intrigue of the Danish court in Hamlet, the modern director not only divests that play of much of its richness, but also runs the risk of misunderstanding it, presenting it as a psychology work-out for a depressed adolescent, rather than the social and personal tragedy of a political leader-in-waiting, something any society can relate to.

The current ne plus ultra of this approach is the recent BBC series, Shakespeare Retold. This “prestige” drama series stuffed with A-list TV celebs prides itself on witty retellings of Shakespeare stories. But the results beg the question: just what did his genius consist of? According to the Beeb, it’s plots, because that’s all that’s left in their own versions. This completely ignores the fact that, with the exception of The Merry Wives Of Windsor, Shakespeare nicked all his plots from other sources. But most damningly, it also suggests the total disregard for the true richness of his work: its language. Those who really admire Shakespeare are in love with his cadences, his rhythms, his vocabulary, his verse, the extraordinary precision of storytelling and emotional truth reached through words alone.

But this very language is often the first casualty of the adaptation process because it’s not immediately intelligible and it’s assumed one needs some sort of education to handle it – though I dispute that. It also presents a particular problem for foreign adaptors, as literature of any kind always loses something in translation. There has been the odd successful attempt at capturing a literary classic for viewers abroad – see Anthony Burgess’s subtitles for Cyrano De Bergerac (1990). But more often than not, the director abandons the original words and tries to replace them with a dramatic paradigm of their own. The most famous example in Shakespearean terms is Akira Kurosawa’s Throne Of Blood (1957), a Japanese version of Macbeth. This film has been praised for substituting the techniques of Noh drama for those of Elizabethan stagecraft, creating a vivid visual texture. But there’s no escaping the fact that, deprived of Shakespeare’s complex dialogue, the story loses its psychological complexity and emotional nuances. The result is a beautiful but rather empty experience.

The other problem thrown up by the language is that it demands a certain kind of acting. The common complaint from American performers – voiced repeatedly in Al Pacino’s Looking For Richard (1996) – is that Americans can’t do Shakespeare. The film, of course, proves this to be wrong but can’t help remarking on the various reasons why it might be the case. The plays are written in verse, so the characters speak in a non-naturalistic style. They also do not exchange remarks as in casual conversation, but announce their feelings in speeches. In other words, a declamatory, oratorical style of acting is required. British thesps, still largely trained for the stage, are more comfortable with such artifice, as theatre necessarily demands a performance style that puts clarity of voice and gesture above realistic reactions. Americans, on the other hand, are part of a more TV/cinema-centric culture. Here the “Method” – in which the actor finds the emotional truth of their character by calling on their own experiences – has a stranglehold on acting technique. This puts a barrier between the actor and the classical text because the former has no relationship in reality with the latter. Thus, the performances of some popular Hollywood stars in Shakespeare can seem very awkward.

This, then, is the problem facing directors – that the quality Shakespeare’s admirers most love, the beauty of the language, is the biggest obstacle to a successful adaptation. But there lies the rub: most TV and film adaptations of Shakespeare are produced for people who don’t love his work. They’re for people who judge a production by the quality of the sets and the staging of battle sequences, and who fall asleep during the “boring speeches”. They’re a philanthropic attempt to bring Shakespeare to “the masses”. It’s assumed that the notoriously theatre-phobic world of filmgoers would not ordinarily care to see his plays – thus an adaptation must be brought down to their level. The verse must be cut or simplified, ruffs and swords replaced by T-shirts and guns. And so it is that the crucial translation of Shakespeare to screen is really that of a supposedly elitist art form into a populist one.

This is where Forbidden Planet comes in. It, too, abandons the Elizabethan world, the verse, even the plot. But then it doesn’t pretend to be an adaptation – it’s happy to be recognised as that most ordinary of things, a sci-fi blockbuster. It’s only inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and this allows it to find a whole new language – a cinematic language – in which to address the play’s ideas, while at the same time being perfectly in accordance with popular taste. Ariel’s magic attacks on the shipwrecked sailors are translated into elegant tracking shots from the monster’s point of view, the issue of Prospero’s power becomes that of scientific responsibility in the atomic age. Paradoxically, by completely embracing a popular genre, Forbidden Planet turns out to be a more intelligent adaptation than the middlebrow, halfway-houses of Branagh and Zeffirelli.

Another example is Robert Wise’s underrated West Side Story (1961), itself an adaptation of Leonard Bernstein’s musical based on Romeo and Juliet. OK, so Richard Beymer is horribly miscast, but check out the opening sequence. The overture is played and then we cut to an extraordinary overhead shot of New York. There is an eerie silence, barely punctuated by the sounds from the streets and the estuary, as the camera glides slowly over the skyscrapers down to a poor neighbourhood. It’s an omniscient, God-like perspective that perfectly mirrors that of the Prologue who sets the scene at the start of Shakespeare’s text. Then Wise plunges us into the streets. We’re at eye-level with the city’s people now, the camera tracking back away from the gangs as they run and dance down alleyways, Sondheim’s lyrics catching their jarring argot. The quiet has given way to chaos. It’s the perfect cinematic translation of the atmosphere of hostility and antagonism that launches the play. And indeed, the musical is a brilliant vehicle for Shakespeare, the consciously artificial convention of characters breaking into song calling for a more stylised, exaggerated realism that is ideal for his work.

This, then, is one way to approach the adaptation – to transform the original completely and make it into a modern genre movie. But there is another way, and that’s to do the exact opposite. Rather than work against theatrical convention, actually embrace it and make it the structuring influence of your film. The most successful example of this technique is Eric Rohmer’s film of Chretien de Troyes’ 12^th-century poem, Perceval Le Gallois (1978). Rohmer deliberately sets the whole story in a simple set, complete with two-dimensional trees and buildings – as if the RSC were performing in the Blue Peter studio. The actors speak in verse and the action is punctuated by chamber music sung by an onscreen chorus. The cumulative effect is like that of watching a medieval mystery play. What this allows him to do is preserve the essence of de Troyes’ work and its context but, at the same time, force the viewer to register the tension between the old medium and the new. As such, the film could almost be rated a work of modern art, as it self-reflexively calls attention to its style. Thus, it is both faithful to the spirit of the source work and wholly cinematic, the very adoption of stage convention becoming a filmic coup de theatre.

Laurence Olivier tried this in Henry V (1944), where he opens the film at The Globe in London and the first few scenes are played out as in the theatre. Even when the film moves away from the stage to other locations, Olivier preserves the sense of artifice in the sets. As with Perceval, we can therefore enjoy the original work while contemplating the witty way it’s been brought to us. From this perspective, Olivier’s use of voiceover for the soliloquies in Hamlet (1948) seems a retrograde step – the cinematic device puncturing the bubble of stage convention only to seem more theatrical and cliched.

But, as is always the case, it’s the film that breaks all these rules that proves to be the best. Orson Welles’ Chimes At Midnight (1966) is based principally on the Henry IV plays but snatches material from three others. It plays fast and loose with the text and has such poor sound recording that the dialogue is often inaudible. Theatrical convention is forsaken for all the trademarks of cinema: close-ups, montage, voiceover. But at the core of Welles’ design is the simple belief that adaptation means the rights of authorship now pass from the original writer to his adaptor. Thus, Chimes At Midnight feels like an Orson Welles movie, rather than a servile retread of a familiar play, and his Falstaff a surreptitious self-portrait to put alongside Charles Foster Kane and Hank Quinlan. The battle comes forward in all its brilliantly-edited glory to become the key metaphor for the passing of old England. Where Shakespeare’s speeches can do all the work, they’re left alone and Gielgud rises to the occasion beautifully. But where a close-up can be just as articulate, the verse can wait and so Falstaff’s expression when he is rejected by Hal is one of the most haunting in cinema. This is true adaptation: honouring the original by making it your own. Falstaff becomes Welles – that is truly Shakespeare in translation.