Last week I finally made it to the ‘Staging the World’ exhibition
at the British Museum. It’s only got another week to go, by the way, and it's
well worth it: http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/exhibitions/shakespeare_staging_the_world.aspx
The exhibition is mainly dedicated to artefacts from the
period in which Shakespeare was writing. There is one of the very few surviving
examples of his handwriting, as well as copies of the First Folio. (There’s
also the modern collected edition smuggled onto Robben Island by anti-apartheid
campaigners. It’s incredibly moving to see Nelson Mandela’s signature scrawled
beside a passage on the nature of tyranny from ‘Julius Caesar’.) And then there
are the maps - extraordinarily detailed visual descriptions of London (and
Venice), drawn by hand or printed in intricate details from wood blocks. There are items of
clothing from the time, paintings, swords and daggers, old clocks… And in all
of it, an overwhelming sense of ‘making’ – a physical engagement with the
materials of the time.
It’s often said that Shakespeare’s plays are all about the
ear (you went to ‘hear’ a play, etc.). But what struck me was the sheer ‘materiality’
of theatre, and how this is one of its essential qualities. The magic of prose
and poetry seems to derive from its ability to translate marks on the page into
images and thought. Fine art is about texture, and creates the illusion of three-dimensionality.
You can look all the way around a sculpture, but sculptures rarely move and
speak. Film is all about the eye. Theatre is sometimes described as a metaphorical
medium, but there is something literal about it too. Through costume, set,
light and shade and the sheer fact of the actors’ presence, theatre speaks to
our world in the physical language of our world.
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