Arts

Age-Blind Hamlet: Ian McKellen’s 82-year-old Dane

By Finn Little

At the beginning of 2021, rumours were being published that Sir Ian McKellen would be returning to the stage as the titular character in Hamlet. The performance was to be an ageblind, gender-blind production where McKellen (82) would be returning to the role of the youthful Dane. The cast would be split between periods of dramatic teaching, McKellen being the only classic Shakespearean. Every time I mentioned this setup to those interested, I regularly got the reply, ‘This seems… wrong.’

It’s not shocking that many find this concept abrasive. How can someone escape the fact that the Prince of Denmark is twenty years older than his own mother? That a twenty-year-old Ophelia is pining for a lover who could be her grandfather?

McKellen had played the role before in 1971, admired for his part in the youthful and psychedelic production, the signature performance in the barrage of Shakespearian shows at the time. Who was to expect this new production would violently contrast every bit of the previous? This new production is brutalist in design, remarked as a ‘quixotic’ performance of ages from the cast. The settings are sometimes clubs, sometimes old apartments, sometimes dirty streets or docks. A rusty fire escape hangs over the main stage expanding the paths around the kingdom of Denmark, far away from the previous psychedelic fairy-tale.

McKellen’s differing style to younger performers fits itself with the maddening conflict of Hamlet’s sanity. He is wise, aggressive, sarcastic, moronophobic to those around him. McKellen’s Hamlet has seen too much of a sensible world, and in relief uses his madness to do what both the elderly and the youthful excel in: angsty rebellion. This is adapted from Laurence Olivier’s performances, where Hamlet is distraught by his mother for marrying his uncle. McKellen has taken and adapted the role for this. He is as much playing the mentor to his enemies (his mother and his uncle) as a torn youth. In the scene where he confronts Gertrude you can see the roles change back and forth as McKellen’s own age seems to tip like a scale.

I watched this performance on August 13th 2021, the farthest row from the stage at the Windsor Royal. For many watching this performance it would have been their first time back in the theatre since the lockdowns. I happened to be sat next to a woman from Essex who told me in the interval about how she had loved travelling to London to watch Shakespeare. She had seen Hamlet a handful of times before in the main theatres. ‘But nothing like this’, she came to add.

Perhaps it’s the feeling of being back in theatres, perhaps it’s the decisions that have never been tried before on theatre, but I can’t say I found anything ‘wrong’ with McKellen’s Hamlet. If anything, his performance encourages us to see what can be done with plays people already idolise, demonstrating how theatre is the best way to twist a concept away from the conventional.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

Great Yarmouth: home of golden sands, the famous Pleasure Beach, the Time and Tide Museum. Oh, and now multiple works of art by the world-famous artist Banksy. That’s right, Banksy has been hard at work just down the road, and it’s not just Great Yarmouth – Cromer, Lowestoft, Gorleston and Oulton Broad were also places the artist visited while on what he coined his ‘Great British Staycation’.

Three different murals by the artist were unveiled at the beginning of August in Great Yarmouth. The first, located above a bus stop, illustrates a couple dancing to the music of a man playing an accordion. The second displays a rat painted on the side of a small model house next to the words ‘Go big or go home’. The final mural, which has actually now been removed by the local council as a sign of ‘sensitivity’ to a nearby death in the area, illustrated two children on an inflatable dinghy blowing in the wind.

All of the works in Great Yarmouth evoke qualities that are typical of the street artist. Filled with tongue in cheek humour, every work is bold in style and has been crafted using expertly configured stencils and spray paint. The range of monochromatic tones make the work stand out from the walls they have been very specifically placed on, no doubt causing everyone who walks past to take a look.

As always with a Banksy piece, along with the humorous aspect to his work, there is also a deeper meaning to everything that is created. Some have suggested that the dancing figures on top of the bus stop are actually in reference to our new-found freedom after Covid. Others have pointed out that the music players’ downcast expression could be representative of how others often reap the rewards of hard work in our society. Maybe the work was created for another reason entirely, we’ll never know. That’s the beauty of Banksy’s work, it is available for all to make up their own mind as to what It might mean – if anything at all.

There is one undoubtable consequence to Banksy’s visit to the region - his recent presence has been a great addition to the culture of our surrounding area. Those that live nearby have been treated to living alongside some world-class art, meanwhile businesses have been able to take advantage of the mass of tourists who are wanting to get a glimpse of a Banksy work. After all, who wouldn’t want their streets to become a bit more cheerful?

Banksy in Great Yarmouth

By Elizabeth Woor

Photo: Unsplash

“It’s moved from a problem for the next generation to a problem for right now and we’re not ready for it”: UEA Professor and playwright Steve Waters reflects on his work on climate change

By Dolly Carter

Steve Waters’ The Secret Life of Plays became a staple of my bedside table reading stack before coming to university. Renowned as ‘the place where literature lives’, UEA has seen the birth of countless award-winning works of fiction, poetry, and drama, with a collection of critically acclaimed professors to match. Described as ‘one of the UK’s most accomplished political playwrights’, Waters has jumped from page to screen, as he tells me about his latest set of climate-related projects over Zoom.

In March 2020, a long-forgotten grant application to the Arts and Humanities Research Council returned successful. Having made the application with little hope, Waters notes his surprise in receiving a grant from an institute he had originally believed to be geared toward conventional academic study. Aiming to ‘amplify the message of conservation and get it out of the hands of the professionals and into ordinary contexts’, Steve embarked on the Song of the Reeds: Dramatising Conservation with the support of Strumpshaw and Wicken Fen nature reserves.

Due to take place across a two-week period in September, the core funded element of the project is Murmurations, a show performed by outdoor theatre experts Tangled Feet at the two supporting reserves. Audience members are to wear headphones, as they are led into the performance space, uncovering layers of stories through character, poetry, and music. Waters says this play addresses the ‘human need for the natural environment’, a need which has become acute over the last 18 months as the world has been plunged into lockdown and prevented from leaving their vicinity: ‘suddenly, people have realised the ground beneath their feet is the subsoil of their happiness’. The play follows types of people you both would and would not expect to meet in a nature reserve, emphasising the necessity of falling in love with where we live again.

As a parallel endeavour, Song of the Reed is a radio drama featuring UEA Scriptwriting lecturer Molly Naylor and Drama alumni Ella Dorman-Gajic – a deliberate choice from Waters to help ‘ground the play in the region. Commissioned by the BBC in June, Song of the Reed is a site-specific drama focussed upon the microcosm of a reserve and featuring the practical work of conservation. Waters tells me each episode has a guest species, the first being the Swallowtail Butterfly, a species I recognise, and the second, the Little Whirlpool Ramshorn Snail. He notices my confusion at the latter and is quick to reassure me: “don’t worry if you’re not familiar with it, no-one is” – an apt reminder of the importance of his work. Waters says there is something quite ‘comic and wonderful’ about the proceedings of this episode, in which humans chase around for the welfare of this 5mm creature.

Moving away from the modular structures of the theatre company or the radio, Waters has also created Voices of the Reeds. This project is a 12-part polyphony featuring 12 voices which cross both geography and history, setting East Anglia as the ‘cradle of environmental and ecological thinking’. With the help of Literature, Drama, and Creative Writing lecturer Mike Bernardin, Waters has produced an open-source drama, with some monologues and duologues being recorded and laid against footage of the region from the East Anglian Film Archive. Within these pieces, he has made an effort to represent marginal figures from the history of ecology, noting the importance of ‘democratising climate change discourse’. He promotes the viewing of climate-related problems not only as an environmental issue, but also as an ethical and political one, pointing to the disproportionate effect climate change has upon marginalised communities: ‘climate change is seen as a left-wing issue… and the reaction to it is a right-wing issue. I think that’s a tragedy’.

Finally, Waters moves on to tell me about Rothschild’s Walk, a piece which emerged from his own fascination with the fate of the fens across the UK, taking note of the devastation of wetlands throughout human history. He chose to create a piece which speaks to Nathaniel Charles Rothschild one of the founding benefactors of Wicken Fen and The Great Fen, in epistolary form. Waters embarked on the 39-mile walk across Cambridgeshire between the two fens to create this play and first performed it in Ely in June.

Both Voices of the Reed and Rothschild’s Walk are to be performed at the theatre and activist festival organised by UEA students, which is due to take place at the end of October before COP26, the UN Climate Change Conference.

Delving deeper into his perspective on current climate action, Waters believes the recent increase in extreme weather events are profoundly challenging our political system: ‘projections have proved to be too mild, too cautious, and too far ahead… we’ve been concentrating on the idea that climate change is coming to get us in 30 years – it has arrived 20 years ahead of schedule’. Commenting more directly upon UK leadershwip and the government’s attitude toward the climate crisis, Waters expresses his condemnation: ‘historically, it’s unfortunate that we have this government at this time’.

So, where do Steve Waters’ playwriting endeavours fall into this? He is hoping to radically change scriptwriting by inverting the priorities of drama. ‘Hopefully, it will galvanise people, embolden them to think, engage, and take steps’.