The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare Read Free Book Online Page B

formal French garden that “manages, in fact, to reconcile two different approaches: hand-on-heart and tongue-in-cheek.” 23 The women were stately in public but prone to giggles and irreverence when private and, unusually, Peter O’Farrell’s Turio was singled out for praise, “whirring around the Junoesque Sylvia (Joanna McCallum) with incredible speed and holding balletic postures like a vainglorious white mouse.” 24
    Charles Newell’s 1990 American touring production with the Acting Company marked a growing interest in self-conscious theatricality, opening to the sound of an orchestra tuning up and two projected silhouettes of Valentine and Proteus struggling over a baton. To a score of freeform jazz, the play spiraled toward its chaotic climax:
    The attempted rape of Silvia is horrifyingly realistic. She and Proteus overturn a couch in a struggle that lasts several minutes, and, when she resists, he slaps her viciously. This rapist means business. Valentine’s intervention is equally brutal—he only just resists bringing a log down on his betrayer’s skull with killing force. The image visually echoes their opening wrestling bout. 25
    The notion that the play’s value was to be found in its darker edges would gain increasing currency in the twenty-first century.
    In 1996, the reconstructed Globe in London opened with Jack Shepherd’s production of
Two Gentlemen
, with Mark Rylance as Proteus and Anastasia Hille as Silvia. Most reviewers were more concerned with the new space, which had a significant impact on the performance: for example, audience members hissed at Proteus’ plans. Rylance, “although peddling a sharp comic line in repressed, buttoned-up gaucheness, is a sentimental study of the villain as little boy lost.” 26 Three years later, Julia Anne Robinson directed the play in the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, a production received well by its intended school audiences.
    As with
The Merchant of Venice
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, the central male friendship of
Two Gentlemen
can be usefully appropriated for a more explicitly homosexual reading. Stuart Draper’s 2004 production transferred from New York to London, and announced its intentions in a prologue where,
    To the dying strains of an orchestral regurgitation of the Bee Gees’ hit “Tragedy,” the two Veronese gentlemen begin canoodling under a tree. As Valentine finishes reciting Christopher Marlowe’s amorous lyric “Come live with me and be my love” to his boyfriend Proteus, the latter’s father steams in and begins shouting abuse while Valentine is taken to one side and duffed up by his henchmen. 27
    Performed in a spirit of “raucous caricature and high camp,” 28 this energetic version found a new narrative for the comedy with serious, unsettling undertones concerning prejudice and familial expectations.
    While a return by theater companies to the ironic use of farce has been enlightening in the case of some of Shakespeare’s early comedies (particularly
The Comedy of Errors
and
The Taming of the Shrew
), in the case of
Two Gentlemen
the play itself risks being lost under its parodic adaptations (such as a
Dawson’s Creek
TV episode entitled “Two Gentlemen of Capeside” [2000]; Adam Bertocci’s hysterical amalgamation of Shakespeare and the Coen Brothers in
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
, 2009). 29 However, the use of physical comedy and playful theatricality has, in different cultural contexts, recently offered fresh perspectives on the play, as in Helena Pimenta’s production for the Basque ur Teatro, which used a hedonistic 1920s music hall style to critique the evasion of moral responsibility. In 2006, the Brazilian company Nós do Morro (“Us From the Hillside,” a group from Vidigal, a shantytown outside Río de Janeiro) visited the RSC Complete Works Festival in partnership with the Birmingham youth project Gallery 37 (a talented group of underprivileged young people from Birmingham), in a production