The project was called Shakespeare M.D., and it was an interesting hybrid of traditional theatre and performance art. As a 'doctor', I'd interview audience members (or 'patients', as we referred to them) and, after a series of personal questions, I'd prescribe one of the pieces from our repertoire for them to receive a private performance of (as the 'treatment'). I went into the run very excited about the opportunity to confront our audience with art chosen to get under their skin. I had underestimated our audience.
Our Kate and Petruchio told me about their scene from The Taming Of The Shrew, and the difference that it made when their solitary audience member was male or female. I stood outside the performance box while Iago planted the seeds of jealous madness in Othello, and heard the 'patient' try to stop Iago with increasingly insistent cries of "No. NO. No you did NOT." I spoke to one man, visibly shaken after seeing Portia's speech to Brutus from Julius Caesar, who had really wanted to respond to her at the end of the monologue. There are many more examples, but the point is this: people were stepping up and engaging the text and the characters in a way that doesn't happen often in a traditional theater setting.
It may have been the proximity, the lack of potential judgement from other audience members, or maybe simply the heat. In any case, it brought to mind a piece of the puzzle that I often wrestle with when staging Shakespeare: how were these plays originally meant to be performed?
There's a movement towards authenticity in staging Shakespeare's works. With no direct proof of the circumstances or traditions of performance from sixteenth-century London, we can only guess what went on at the Globe or the Blackfriars. Attempts at recreating Shakespeare's original practices can be as simple as a minimalist approach to sets and staging, or as ambitious as giving the actors only their own lines and having them perform with little or no rehearsal. Recent productions have even left the house lights on to simulate the experience of attending an outdoor theater in the afternoon! These are all valuable experiments, certainly, but I'm always wary of focusing on the letter of the rules and thereby missing their spirit. I'd rather get to the core of why Shakespeare's work resonates today, rather than trying to recreate the specifics of a time and place long-gone.
So: back to the eight-foot box in the beer tent behind Honest Ed's. Despite the completely strange circumstances, I think we found something very near to how these plays were originally intended to work. The setting of a crappy plastic box, hot and clammy and leaking all sorts of noise from outside, required our audience to engage imaginatively just as though they were in Shakespeare's barren "wooden O". With no effects or lighting or anything beside the occasional simple prop, the actors needed to engage the sort of emotional fireworks that these plays are written for. The audience member being alone with the scene gave them license, I suspect, to respond as honestly and vocally as any sixteenth-century grounding. We certainly didn't play by the academic rules of original Shakespearian practise, but I can't shake the feeling that we tapped into some very simple and deep truths about how and why these incredible plays work