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Raunchy puppet tale of Venus and Adonis
Tom Foot talks to the man pulling the strings in a new production of Shakespeare’s racy love story
SHAKESPEARE’S X-rated bestseller Venus and Adonis must have come as welcome respite for Elizabethans living in dread of the Black Death.
Few will know it now but by the close of the 16th century Shakespeare’s 1,200 line erotic poem about a beautiful boy Adonis who spurns the obsessive advances of Venus to go boar hunting with his mates was all the rage.
It was the Lady Chatterley’s Lover of the day, reprinted in 16 editions, and earning the Bard more money than all his major plays put together.
In 1593, when he wrote the poem, the authorities shutdown the theatres fearing the spread of the bubonic plague.
The call of “bring out your dead, bring out your dead” was the only chorus to be heard.
It was a major blow for the Bard, whose successful history plays had began to pack the playhouses of the City of London.
Shakespeare’s world was imploding – and not for the first time.
At an early age he had watched as the Black Death took his baby sisters Joan and Margaret and his brother Edmund. Later his favourite son Hamnet aged 11 would follow.
It is hard to imagine how, with London’s putrid sewers filling the City with an unimaginable stench as bodies piled up in the streets, he found the inspiration for what he described in the poem’s dedication as the “first heir of my invention”.
The racy story not only offered a titillating escape from one of the most devastating pandemics of all time but also hope for the future:
And as they last, their verdure still endure,
To drive infection from the dangerous year!
That the star-gazers,
having writ on death,
May say, the plague is banish’d by thy breath.
A rare staging of this 1,200 line poem comes to the Little Angel Theatre in a Royal Shakespeare Company adaptation, using Japanese Bunraku puppets and carrying a parental advisory warning.
RSC associate chief director Greg Doran directs and leading actress Harriet Walter, fresh from playing Cleopatra alongside Patrick Stewart in January, narrates on stage.
“It is very funny and of course erotic”, says Doran.
“It contains some of his finest poetry with tragedy at the end. There is magic and fantasy – a toy boy, two talking horses and a wild boar. It is the complete experience, a little Shakespeare gem.”
Doran is also on the board of his local theatre, the Little Angel Theatre.
Usually the playhouse of puppets and primary school children, ‘the home of British puppetry’ will stage the sexually charged performance after Doran visited Japan on tour with Macbeth.
He says: “I was in Japan and someone there said we should go and see Bunraku. I went along not really thinking what to expect but it completely blew me away. I was bowled over by the skill of the performance.
“They are beautiful craftsmen. When we came out someone asked me how they got the facial expressions to change – but they don’t. It is the way they control them. It’s a real thrill.
“There was more than 1,000 in the audience and none of them were children. I thought ‘That’s it! That is how we stage Venus’!”
“The Little Angel has a 100 capacity. It will be better in some ways because you are so close to the performers.
“The Little Angel is a major resource. We should celebrate the difference we have in staging productions like these.”
Doran was among the first to get a civil partnership at Islington’s Town Hall.
He and his life partner Sir Antony Sher began their theatrical relationship which became public after they published the book Woza Shakespeare!, a wonderful account of staging Macbeth in apartheid South Africa.
Doran has since strived to undermine stuffy preconceptions of Shakespeare and here we find him at it again.
Along with Trevor Nunn he was tasked by the RSC with what he describes as the “privilege” of staging Shakespeare’s the Complete Works.
“I think I’ve got it pretty good. Mine’s the best job going,” says Doran, who is currently working with Sir Ian McKellen in the much-hyped King Lear coming to London in May.
“My greatest achievement was Macbeth with Harriet Walter and Antony Sher. We travelled around the world together and shook the play’s curse off.”
Doran’s Coriolanus is literally bringing the house down in Stratford – the historic Royal Shakespeare Theatre is being torn down for redevelopment after the production.
Maybe it was the revolutionary impulses of that play that had stirred Doran. But he suddenly angrily revealed the struggles actors face after terrible cuts in government subsidy during the Thatcher years.
But rather like Shakespeare pulling his bestseller out of the Black Death, Doran looks forward optimistically. Out of darkness, comes light.
He says: “We should be able to pay actors more so that they don’t hold out for some crap TV rather than stretch themselves in the theatre.
“The role of the theatre and live performance is becoming more important, more unique. It’s an event, a risk. And because of that it is all building toward a big theatre, which tells big themes, big stories.”
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