Stage adaptations: a British foursome

"To adapt or not to adapt"—that is often the question in reviving the classics.

How do you revitalize the plays of the past? Do you clothe the classics in modern dress? Do you transpose them to other times and settings? Or do you leave the play well enough alone, in the skin in which it was born? Do you cut/edit/alter the text?

After all, in most cases, the author has been dead for decades"“ if not centuries— and isn't around to protest.

These are some of the issues that the British theater has been addressing in a number of provocative productions this spring. In London, critics and audiences have been provoked into debate by a daring updating of Women Beware Women, a moralistic 1621 tragedy-with-teeth by Thomas Middleton (a contemporary of Shakespeare) that's receiving a cutting-edge revival at the Royal National Theatre.

Should it have been reset in the 1950s jazz age, as director Marianne Elliott has boldly re-imagined it? Or left to rest in its original 17th Century Medici Florentine context?

Corruption for our times

Women Beware Women tells a lurid tale of corruption and intrigue in the palazzos of the Florentine rich and famous. Its protagonist"“ a noblewoman named Livia"“ will go to any length just for the fun of it. "I've been idle too long," she explains, as she connives to bring down everyone around her, amused by the extent to which her power and prowess can pull down her peers.

Livia persuades one young noblewoman to sleep with her uncle (though she' s already engaged), and manipulates another virtuous (married) beauty into the hands of a rapacious duke, who makes her his sex slave. As the plot twists and turns, no one is incorruptible"“ not even the beauty's devoted husband, who seeks revenge by sleeping with Livia, diving headlong into the reptilian sea of licentiousness and greed.

"It's a witty age," Livia explains, where "women are bought and sold." Indeed, some scenes resemble a lurid rendering of today's runways for the commoditization of women: fashion shows, say, or the red carpet at the Oscars.

Does this indulgent, narcissistic society seem familiar? It certainly does to director Elliott, who has mounted a lavish black-and-gilded Felliniesque production, complete with a jazz ensemble and silver-clad vocalist perched high above the decadent fray. As the turnstile set revolves and crystal chandeliers fly, the egregious extravaganza spins out of control.

The play ends with a macabre masque, a dance of death littering the marble floors with bodies of these damned souls, leaving us with a disturbing image of our own excessive era. "Where corruption reigns, this prince cannot reign long" is an appropriate admonition for our times"“ one we can hear, thanks to this striking re-imagining of a rarely performed classic.

Romeo with headphones

Re-imagining Shakespeare in other times and contexts is a common practice, from Peter Brook's 1970 Midsummer Night's Dream, set in a circus, to Michael Almeyreda's 2000 Hamlet, set in corporate America. The contemporary British director Rupert Goold is noted for his radical updatings (his recent Stalinist Macbeth was set in a kitchen-turned-abattoir, and his Tempest was set on a polar ice cap).

This time, Goold has turned his innovative eye to Romeo and Juliet with a fiery, fast-paced production currently running at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford-on-Avon, and his eclectic choices are jolting. His is the first Juliet I've ever seen clad in a black sun dress and high-top black sneakers twirling a silver yo-yo, while Romeo sports a Gap ensemble (jeans and a hoody) topped with headphones. They stand out in stark contrast to the rest of the cast, who wear elaborate Elizabethan costumes"“ thus setting the pair apart, and underscoring the timelessness of their innocent young love.

Goold further intensifies their isolation by setting these modern lovers in a traditional world consumed by the fire of religious fervor. The slick black set is continually engulfed in flames, as the warring Montagues and Capulets"“ icons of the old order"“ burn, while the sanctity of the young lovers remains unscorched.

In a final jolt, Goold has his Juliet die in a pure white Renaissance bridal gown, while the remaining cast invades her tomb in modern-day police dress. In this sudden reversal, Goold offers us a striking, classical image of eternal true love, while the rest of the world"“ past and present— goes up in a blaze. (Look for this provocative production in 2011 as part of New York's summertime Lincoln Center Festival).

Beyond Stalin's censors

Updating and resetting the classics is one thing; creating a dramatic text from other literary forms is quite another. Take The White Guard, for example, currently enjoying critical acclaim at the National Theatre. Quite literally, it's a version of a version of a novel that was itself a version of a lost play.

Explanation? In 1926 the Moscow Art Theatre commissioned the novelist Mikhail Bulgakov to adapt his banned autobiographical novel, The White Guard, dramatizing post-revolutionary 1918 Russia in the throes of Civil War. The Days of the Turbins (a pseudonym for Bulgakov's own family), as the play was called, caused a sensation and ran for decades (it became, inexplicably, a favorite of Stalin).

Fast forward to 2009. Andrew Upton, who was fascinated by the play's historical depth, sought to dig deeper and uncover more of the truth than Stalin's censors allowed. This adaptation dramatizes the struggle of one loyalist family to survive a time of unimaginable chaos, when Tsarist forces, despotic German occupants, brutal Ukrainian nationalists and fanatical Bolsheviks battled for control of Kiev (the Ukrainian government changed hands more than a dozen times from 1917 to 1922 until it finally joined the USSR). The cultured Turbin family endures famine, defection, betrayal and death.

"This world hates us for our tradition," says one member, offering the realization that only love and friendship, art, music and books matter. "There's a tide rising against us"“ it is the future," says another helplessly, expressing the futility of upholding family values and codes of honor against inexorable change.

Under the expert direction of Howard Davies, this stirring production (with a company of 27 actors) dramatizes a devastating chapter of history that offers us a warning for today.

"These people are honorable, good people," writes Upton to explain why he adapted this play for our era. "It just happens they are in support of a system that is killing the country." Today, Upton contends, "The horror we refuse to face has different, thinner fingers," implying that we have much to fear from what is being covered up today by our own regimes.

Homer's Odyssey— on stage?

Then there is adaptation that comes, quite simply, from the joy and challenge of a taking a timeless story and bringing it alive on the stage. Homer's Odyssey has received a vibrant production at the Oxford Playhouse, located in that eponymous citadel of spires and the inspired.

To adapt this 12,000-line classical epic is no small feat. But the spirited troupe of Oxford players wisely chose American director Mary Zimmerman's eminently entertaining stage rendering of Robert Fitzgerald's translation. Zimmerman is one of America's foremost and fearless adaptors"“ her other credits include no less than Metamorphosis, The Arabian Nights, and the Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci.

Her lively adaptation of The Odyssey goes with the flow of this sprawling story, hitting all the high points"“ from Scylla and Charybdis to the Lotus-Eaters to Polyphemus to the Sirens to numerous others, concluding with Odysseus's penultimate test at the hands of his wife's suitors and his touching reunion with Penelope.

In the Oxford production, director Rafaella Marcus has assembled a youthful cast of 20 to tell the age-old tale in words, music and movement, providing every phase of the story with vivid visual choices. Under her imaginative direction, her cast (simply and scantily clad in generic white cotton) forms a phalanx of seafaring Greeks strewn across the seas. In one moment they are a flock of the Cyclops sheep, in another they are Circe's swine. As sirens, they slip on black masks and disrobe, tempting Odysseus's men in an erotic sequence accompanied by an on-stage orchestra.

The key to a successful adaptation is a compelling vision or reason to adapt. This is clearly the case in Zimmerman's play text and Marcus's direction. "Sometimes a story comes along that needs to be told and told again at every stage of our lives because it changes as we change," says Marcus. "The Odyssey is one of those stories."

What better place than Oxford, where the study of the classics is the reigning religion, to stage an adaptation of this age-old story, and revitalize a hallowed place with a fresh and bold interpretation?