Changing Times at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival

LIBBY APPEL: The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has gone through its own history of being part of the fashions of the times. That sounds a little whimsical and trivial, but in fact it's actually what all of art does; it fits into its own period. When it was begun by Angus Bowmer in 1935, it was still an early period in the interpretation of Shakespeare plays as discovered by Harley Granville Barker and William Poel—the idea of doing the plays as written, rather than some actor-manager, some famous actor like David Garrick or Henry Irving, interpreting the plays.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, King Lear didn't die. Cordelia didn't die and she married Edgar. Romeo and Juliet woke up in the tomb and remarried. It depended upon who the actors were that were doing the plays, and they completely reinterpreted the plays to fit their artistic personalities. But William Poel and Harley Granville Barker said these plays are great works of art unto themselves, and thus began the rather strict interpretation, and when the Shakespeare festival in Oregon began, Angus Bowmer, our extraordinary visionary artistic director and founder, decided to go the way of his teacher, B. Iden Payne, who was a student of Harley Granville Barker and William Poel, and so he interpreted the plays very strictly.

What that meant was they were done without intermission, they were done straight through, and they were uncut. So that meant you saw a four-and-a-half-hour Richard III or Hamlet and that meant that the audience had the—and they were done in Elizabethan costume only—that the audience had the temperament and the willingness, if you will, and the thrill, because the Shakespeare festival was a popular event from the very first minute it began, to sit and see the plays uncut and uninterpreted, if you will.

I have a contention, to tell you the truth, that I do not believe there is such a thing as noninterpretation. The instant words are put into an actor's mouth, with anybody to guide those words, a director in other words, that means that there is thought behind what does it mean and what is this person, the character, trying to say, and that means there is interpretation. Anyway, that trend of doing the plays as, in quotes, "written," end quotes, lasted until the early 70s, and people came to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to see their Shakespeare uncut, unchanged, and, in a sense, kind of like a museum theater.

Because of people like Peter Brook and other really great directors in the world, people started to get permission to interpret the art differently. And the Shakespeare festival under the guidance of Jerry Turner, who was the artistic director who followed Angus Bowmer, began to interpret the plays differently. First of all, he started to cut them. He put in an intermission. He started to sometimes dress the plays in different periods in order to express the strong message of the play.

I still get the occasional letter of "Why can't the festival go back to showing us Elizabethan Shakespeare? I'm not interested in seeing your modern interpretation." But really the trend from Elizabethan Shakespeare changed significantly in the world and certainly at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And it is crucial to interpret the plays within the sensibility of who you are as an interpretive artist and that means the entire group—the actors, the designers, and the director—for the world that you live in.

That does not mean necessarily putting it in modern dress. Modern dress doesn't always interpret what it is, but you have got to be unafraid to express your personal connections to the plays, and of course the great thing about Shakespeare is that in fact he's bigger than all of us, and he can withstand anything that any of us are going to do to him, because the imagery is so titanic and magnificent, the ideas and the characters so large and important and mythic, if you will, that my little interpretation isn't going to hurt him at all, but there is a great sense of accomplishment when you touch the muse.