L.O.V.E.

Preview from The Times
Tuesday April 6 1993
Ellen Cranitch on the latest, radical attempts to stage Shakespeare's sonnets.
Hard lines for the poor adapter

Shakespeare's sonnets are generally held to be the finest love poems in the English language. Published in 1609 but written earlier for private circulation, some are addressed to a young man, others to a woman: the so-called "Dark Lady". The poems effortlessly transcend this historical and personal context and explore themes of enduring significance: the power of love to conquer time, the transience of physical beauty, the humiliation of being sexually and emotionally enslaved, and the immortality of art.

Though sonnet-writing was supremely fashionable in the 16th century, relatively few poems have stood the test of time. Shakespeare's sonnets have survived because he made constant creative use of the form: he extended its possibilities, ironically subverted its conventions and informed the verse with the directness of the speaking voice.

Attempts have been made to stage the sonnets in the past. The most recent, in 1991, was Shared Experience's Sweet Sessions, in which a contemporary writer enters the 16th-century world of the sonnets and becomes embroiled in the relationships between the three characters whom she meets there. A decade earlier, Simon Callow offered a revised sequence at the National Theatre. But neither reached to the heart of what is inherently dramatic in the poems. The peculiar drama of the sonnets derives from unbridled, sometimes unbearable passion being tautly constrained within a rigorously poetic form.

Director Nigel Charnock, co-founder of the avant-garde dance-theatre group DV8, is the latest would-be adapter of sonnets for the stage. In attempting to bring to life the intense emotion of the poems, Charnock has unapologetically jettisoned much of the sonnet form and created one of the most radical and risky versions to date.

"What I like about the sonnets is that they are like 12-inch dance music singles: short and easy to get to know. But the problem with them is, for all the breadth and intensity of emotion explored, nothing actually happens. We needed to create a narrative, so I spent many nights with the sonnets spread out on my bedroom floor, scrubbing out lines and adding different ones together, making Shakespeare say what I wanted him to say."

His show, curiously entitled L.O.V.E., is performed by Volcano Theatre Company, a Swansea-based group who have a reputation for intellectually provocative and physically arresting stage work.

Like most readers, Charnock had an acutely personal response to the sequence. The focus of it was the Young Man. "Most of my work is fuelled by anger. In the world of dance which I entered after I'd completed training as an actor, I grew to hate the cult of beautiful people with beautiful bodies. The young man of the sonnets fascinates me. He has ignited the love that is tearing the writer apart. Our show explores the moral responsibilities of such beauty. The thrust of the piece is: use it well, don't be childish or manipulative with it, otherwise there will be retribution."

Volcano's show seeks to capture the dramatic essence of the poems in a contemporary ménage à trois. Paul Davies plays the poet in charcoal pullover and loose beige trousers; Liam Steel the young man in sharp leather jacket; and Fern Smith the Dark Lady in a trailing fur coat which she savages almost as much as her own dark hair.

In rehearsal Charnock urged his actors to forget the texts and simply "improvise around the subjects of jealously, infidelity, lust and obsession for a few weeks". Out of this emerged three exhausted actors and one loose narrative.

Charnock dismisses debates that normally polarise academics: whether the Dark Lady had a relationship with the poet before the sequence opens, and whether the relationship between the two men was a sexual one. Charnock decided yes on both counts: "It would be very dry dramatically if you believed the men didn't have a homosexual relationship; then you'd have to keep them apart on stage. I wanted them jumping about in bed together."

Charnock's background in physical theatre served him well. The characters claw at each other, kiss, lick, smell and make love to one another. Bodies clash in violent collision or lock in white-hot embrace. As the tensions of the triangular relationship escalate, the Dark Lady produces a knife and plays games with the semi-naked bodies of the men.

Shakespeare's sonnets are remarkable for the wealth of different meanings contained within each poem's 14 short lines. Charnock makes a fine dramatic exploitation of these ambiguities in his eloquent use of Sonnet 147, "My love is as a fever, longing still…", spoken in frenzied desperation at the beginning of the piece and then reiterated with a terrible lack of passion at the end when the warring turmoil of the relationships is over.

But though some 30-odd sonnets feature intact in L.O.V.E., others have been sweepingly truncated, lines are repeated or isolated, couplets separated or given a new context. In the last 20 minutes of the piece the trio argue with one another using odd lines from right across the sequence.

Moreover, Shakespeare's is not the only voice. He is joined by Shirley Bassey. As the three actors play out the passion and the poison of unrequited love, bursts of pertinent Bassey-sung lyrics (from George Harrison's Something): "Something in the way he moves" and (from Never, Never, Never): "impossible to live with you but I know I could never live without you" amplify their heart-searching.

L.O.V.E. has visited some universities. Does it find favour with the academics? "The show tends to divide its audience," says Charnock. "Some people hate it. But in Northampton, one professor, an expert on the sonnets, said the production made the poems come vibrantly alive for him. He found that breaking the closed sonnet form shook out new meanings."

Not every Shakespeare scholar would agree, but it is possible that Shakespeare himself, a great innovator and stage practitioner, will be craning forward from, rather than turning in, his grave, to see the results tonight.

CREDITS