Van Hove shakes up Shakespeare

The fearless Dutch director Ivo van Hove has been capturing theatergoers' attention since the late '90s, when New York Theatre Workshop began presenting his convention-smashing productions of the classics. Van Hove's stark Streetcar Named Desire (1998) featured Blanche Dubois languishing in a white bathtub. Next came van Hove's rebellious Hedda Gabler (2004), with Hedda stumbling around the stage on high heels and Judge Brack dousing her with V-8 juice.

After that came van Hove's mischievous Misanthrope (2007), featuring a food fight. And most recently, his gothic Little Foxes (2010) offered characters spending much of their time lying on the floor.

I didn't always enjoy van Hove's excessive, kitschy interpretations (not to mention his distracting onstage video screens), which often seemed more attention-grabbing than insightful. But I certainly recognized a compelling new directorial hand, shaking us hardened theatergoers out of our numbing conventions and expectations.

Everyone on stage

Then, last month, with Roman Tragedies at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, van Hove clarified his mission: He's paving a revolutionary way for a whole new, integrated 21st-Century approach to theater production, space and audience experience.

This multi-media theater event (or should I say circus? extravaganza? happening?) features a troupe of 14 Dutch actors, and more than twice as many technicians, musicians and stagehands, all of whom are visible onstage throughout the performance.

The program announces an evening of five hours' duration. It lasts six, with no intermission. The evening includes no fewer than three Shakespearean tragedies: Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra, with actors playing multiple roles.

Living room seating

What makes this undertaking such a milestone is the scope of the production and the phenomenal integration of its elements.

Begin with the theater itself. The entire Gilman Opera House has been converted into a spectator space. When you enter, you're told that you may sit on the stage or in the auditorium, and that you may change your seat and move about freely.

Next: the stage. The majestic, deep Opera House stage has been completely cleared, and filled with multiple seating spaces consisting of living room furniture"“ sofas, chairs, banquettes, coffee tables— grouped in conversation areas for audience members.

Videotaping the action

All around the stage are flat screens— at least 30 of them"“ where you can watch the action. Stage right stands a bar, where you can purchase drinks and snacks. Stage left stands a makeup table, where the actors openly change costume elements.

Now comes the action itself. On a downstage playing space on the proscenium edge, actors perform the tragedies for the audience in the auditorium. At the same time, the actors are taped by technicians with hand-held cameras. That action is simultaneously projected on a giant screen above the actors facing the auditorium and on 30 flat screens all around the stage.

Occasionally, actors will move upstage to one of the "living room areas" and continue performing for the audience members sitting there. The hand-held cameras follow them, so no one misses a thing.

Watching yourself

So imagine yourself as an audience member. If you're seated in the auditorium, you're watching a group of actors performing a scene, and, above them, you see their images enlarged on a mega-screen. Simultaneously, behind this spectacle, you see dozens of audience members (some with their backs to you) clustered around flat screens, watching the same action that you are. If you're seated onstage, you may even see yourself watching the action.

The mind-blowing result of what van Hove calls "polyphonic theater" reorients us to the limitless possibilities of the live theater experience.

To say that "it's all about the experience" would be to ignore van Hove's compelling treatment of the Shakespeare tragedies. All three plays are performed in modern dress, in a style I'd call "expressionistic," enhanced by the multi-media elements.

Digital ticker tape

As you watch Coriolanus, for example, a digital ticker-tape runs across the bottom of each screen, announcing: "60 minutes until Coriolanus dies, 100 minutes until Julius Caesar dies, 200 minutes until Cleopatra dies," etc. These timetable reports, broadcast throughout the evening, serve to unify the continuous performance of the tragedies.

Did I mention that van Hove has paraphrased and translated Shakespeare's English into Dutch? At first, its unfamiliar, guttural sounds are alienating, but you quickly adapt. (Simultaneous English translation is flashed on the screens.)

Translator/adaptor Tom Kleijn has distilled each play to its essence: Coriolanus, the tragedy of war; Julius Caesar, the tragedy of politics and betrayal; Antony and Cleopatra, the tragedy of a decaying society. What themes could be more relevant to our times?

Magical moment

As "Friends, Romans, countrymen" rang out midway through the evening, I found myself overwhelmed by the magnitude of the moment. Hundreds of audience members sit on stage, some facing us, others with their backs to us, watching upstage screens. Clocks deck the stage walls, telling times from all over the world. People snap photos of the action around them with their iPhones. Or they visit computer stations placed to the side of the stage, where they're invited to e-mail their reactions"“ which are then posted on the digital ticker tape on the screens before us.

It's an immediate, integrated theatre-going experience for our times and future ones.

Leave it to van Hove to shock us once again with a final coup de théâtre. As Antony and Cleopatra draws to its close, a strange phenomenon occurs. Gradually, one by one, the flat screens on the stage shut down. Audience members instinctively drift offstage to sit in the auditorium and watch the live actors now performing on the proscenium in a straightforward, conventional style.

In the end, the audience is united in traditional seating, watching a performance of a classic. The journey is complete.

But those who attend a van Hove production can never go back to the way it was. This remarkable director may very well do for theater in our times what Bertolt Brecht did for his.

Brecht's bold new theories on epic theater, political theater, and verfremdungseffect (distancing), along with his revolutionary staging (exposed lighting instruments, the incorporation of film, narration and music in the mise-en-sèene) paved the way for playwrights like Caryl Churchill and Tony Kushner and ground-breaking companies like Theatre de Complicité, Kneehigh and the Wooster Group.

Van Hove's impact, I believe, will be similar. "All the world's a stage," said the Bard, and van Hove brings today's world right into the theater.♦


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