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Lloyd Evans has narrated this article for you to listen to.

A strip club, a prison, a mental asylum, a Great War field hospital, an addiction clinic, a Napoleonic palace. These are the typical locations for a modern production of Shakespeare, whose interpreters seem to agree that any setting is better than the one chosen by the playwright.

The assumption today is that the Bard needs help from directors who can see where he went wrong and know how to get his ideas across with greater force and clarity. Aside from the Greek tragedians, no other playwright attracts this sort of condescending vandalism. If a director were to set The Cherry Orchard on a spaceship or in a Guyanese penal colony, he’d be asked to see a psychiatrist. If he did the same with The Tempest,he’d be given a grant from the local council.

The assumption today is that the Bard needs help from directors who can see where he went wrong

Shakespeare has become the useful idiot of activists and social engineers for two main reasons. First, his top-dog status as the greatest artist ever to use the English language as his instrument. Secondly, his habit of absenting himself from his plays and leaving us to guess what he really thought or felt. Into this void, directors can insert their own ideas, which instantly acquire the lustre of Shakespeare’s authority.

The Bard is often criticised for his neglect of women, whom he fobbed off with far too few decent roles. This is particularly notice-able in the cycle of Henry plays where women are represented by the pub landlady, Mistress Quickly, and a couple of drunken trollops. To correct the imbalance, all-female versions of the Henry cycle have become popular which is due, in part, to Phyllida Lloyd’s acclaimed productions at the Donmar in 2015, starring Harriet Walter.

Shakespeare also sinned against the diversity gods by creating only two title roles for people of colour. Worse still, the African lineage of Cleopatra has been questioned by historians who claim that she and her forebears were all Macedonian. That leaves just one Shakespearean hero with an indisputable African heritage. The easiest way to make Othello more inclusive is to surround the Moor with black actors in the roles of Roderigo, Michael Cassio, the Duke of Venice and so on. This is standard practice nowadays, even though it undermines Othello’s sense of isolation as the only black man in an all-white society. His lack of familiarity with the culture of his adopted country is a critical factor in his downfall. But never mind that. Hiring the right actors from the right social group is more important than making sense of the play.

A favourite approach with Shakespeare’s political dramas is to set the action in a surveillance state with spy cameras everywhere and the characters strutting around like pantomime Nazis in riding breeches, military tunics and gold-tasselled epaulettes. This ‘jackboot Shakespeare’ approach was a cliché 30 years ago when Ian McKellen made his film of Richard III set in a fascist Britain of the 1930s. But this visual idiom retains its appeal to the directing fraternity. It’s rare to see a Shakespeare tragedy without a high-status character dressed up as Colonel Gaddafi or Hermann Göring.

Most directors feel that Shakespeare isn’t modern enough, but Kenneth Branagh took the opposite view when he cast himself as King Lear at Wyndham’s last year. The original, set in pre-Roman Britain, wasn’t old enough for Branagh and he turned the clock back even further to the Stone Age – an epoch that pre-dates the invention of iron tools. This generated unexpected surprises. Branagh and his half-naked colleagues pranced about the stage in bearskin costumes, attempting to stab each other with sticks and sharpened twigs. Apart from the problems with non-lethal weapons, the show had an attractive aesthetic. It resembled a cult movie from the golden age of Swedish porn.

Branagh avoided the error of overreaching himself intellectually. This temptation seems to have affected Max Webster, who created a high-concept version of Macbeth at the Donmar last December, starring David Tennant. Rather than mounting the play on a conventional stage, Webster chose to do the show as a radio drama. He took this Goon Show concept as far as it would go and further. The Donmar was transformed into a BBC recording studio, with the actors seated behind a pane of soundproof glass. The cast members, wearing rudimentary kilts, sauntered around the place speaking their lines softly into microphones, while the audience listened to the show on headsets hooked up to the legs of their chairs. It was bizarre to sit in a theatre watching a radio play being recorded. But any sense of annoyance soon gave way to more charitable thoughts of pity and forgiveness. One felt like a kindly parent humouring a precocious child who wants to impress the adults with a box of puppets.

We mustn’t blame the director, or even the theatre, for such experiments. Producers know that almost every approach to Shakespeare has already been tried at least once. To sell a show to a playhouse and to an audience, a director needs to come up with a motif that’s grander, wilder, fresher and more exciting than anything previously attempted. In a world where experiments are essential, failure is inevitable.

Occasionally someone produces a madcap idea that works. In 2022 the National Theatre staged Much Ado in a luxury hotel on the Italian Riviera during the Jazz Age. It mixed stylish costumes, thrilling music and art deco architecture with a raunchy night-club vibe. And it succeeded because its aims were entirely superficial. The show set out to dazzle the senses without offering sermons on the rise of fascism or the perils of demagoguery.

Sometimes, smaller ideas are better. When Derek Jacobi played Lear at the Donmar, the thunderstorm scene was done in complete silence. It was a stunning breakthrough: the tempest is a figment of the king’s diseased imagination. As an additional benefit, Jacobi was able to deliver his lines audibly without being drowned out by an offstage wobble-board. When Donald Sinden played Malvolio, he underlined the character’s freakish pedantry by entering the garden, checking the sun, checking his fob watch, and checking the sundial. Then he adjusted the sundial. Jude Law’s Hamlet included a scene in which the unshod prince walked through a snowstorm studying a book of philosophy. This small gesture suggested an equivalence between the barefoot prince and Christ or Socrates.

Modest gestures like these tend to deliver far more drama than large-scale refurbs. That said, the cause of experimentation is always worth pursuing even if it mostly fails to improve on the original. Even Shakespeare needs to be duffed up occasionally, to see what he’s really made of./>