The Two Gentlemen of Verona (18 page)

Charles Newell’s 1990 American touring production with the Acting Company marked a growing interest in self-conscious theatricality, opening to the sound of an orchestra tuning up and two projected silhouettes of Valentine and Proteus struggling over a baton. To a score of freeform jazz, the play spiraled toward its chaotic climax:

The notion that the play’s value was to be found in its darker edges would gain increasing currency in the twenty-first century.

In 1996, the reconstructed Globe in London opened with Jack Shepherd’s production of
Two Gentlemen
, with Mark Rylance as Proteus and Anastasia Hille as Silvia. Most reviewers were more concerned with the new space, which had a significant impact on the performance: for example, audience members hissed at Proteus’ plans. Rylance, “although peddling a sharp comic line in repressed, buttoned-up gaucheness, is a sentimental study of the villain as little boy lost.”
²⁶
Three years later, Julia Anne Robinson directed the play in the Cottesloe at London’s National Theatre, a production received well by its intended school audiences.

As with
The Merchant of Venice
and
The Two Noble Kinsmen
, the central male friendship of
Two Gentlemen
can be usefully appropriated for a more explicitly homosexual reading. Stuart Draper’s 2004 production transferred from New York to London, and announced its intentions in a prologue where,

Performed in a spirit of “raucous caricature and high camp,”
²⁸
this energetic version found a new narrative for the comedy with serious, unsettling undertones concerning prejudice and familial expectations.

While a return by theater companies to the ironic use of farce has been enlightening in the case of some of Shakespeare’s early comedies (particularly
The Comedy of Errors
and
The Taming of the Shrew
), in the case of
Two Gentlemen
the play itself risks being lost under its parodic adaptations (such as a
Dawson’s Creek
TV episode entitled “Two Gentlemen of Capeside” [2000]; Adam Bertocci’s hysterical amalgamation of Shakespeare and the Coen Brothers in
Two Gentlemen of Lebowski
, 2009).
²⁹
However, the use of physical comedy and playful theatricality has, in different cultural contexts, recently offered fresh perspectives on the play, as in Helena Pimenta’s production for the Basque ur Teatro, which used a hedonistic 1920s music hall style to critique the evasion of moral responsibility. In 2006, the Brazilian company Nós do Morro (“Us From the Hillside,” a group from Vidigal, a shantytown outside Río de Janeiro) visited the RSC Complete Works Festival in partnership with the Birmingham youth project Gallery 37 (a talented group of underprivileged young people from Birmingham), in a production that adapted the play to the concerns of council estates and favela (Brazilian shantytown) life. The English children wrote their own rap music, which they performed as a group Chorus, mediating the plot and using their bodies to create scenery on a bare stage. The Brazilian actors, meanwhile, used a Portuguese text to turn the play into a series of lyrical combats, with one memorable sequence involving Valentine and Turio performing a “sing-off” in a makeshift boxing ring. The play belonged to Diogo de Brito Sales, however, as a human Crab who bounded among the audience, pretending to lick faces.

Similarly left field was Two Gents’ Productions’
Vakomana Vaviri Ve Zimbabwe
. This international two-man touring production, performed in the style of Zimbabwean township theater, was lively and informal, filled with audience participation. Simple items of clothing (a glove for Silvia; braces for Valentine) signified characters, with Tonderai Munyevu and Denton Chikura acting as storytellers—a character could literally be passed between the two. Julia visited a witch doctor in order to see a vision of Proteus wooing Silvia; and Crab was once more played by a human, though his bitter disdain of Lance had an edge to it. The frenetic comedy, however, gave way to a powerful closing image. Proteus and Valentine had reunited, while Julia and Silvia “lay” on the floor as discarded garments. While the men’s reunion was joyous, the women were visibly forgotten. As the lights faded to black and the two actors once more became the women. Julia moved to the sobbing Silvia, taking her head in her lap. In these stripped-back productions,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
transcended its trivial reputation, and its translation into fresh cultural
contexts continues to unlock fresh potential in this neglected play.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona
is an early Shakespeare play—perhaps the earliest. It is often argued that its main interest lies in a first glimpse of characters, conventions, and tropes which Shakespeare develops and deploys more successfully in later work:

In 1960 in the newly refurbished Shakespeare Memorial Theatre (soon to be renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre) Peter Hall directed a sequence of six Shakespearean comedies suggesting in the program notes that “the early romantic comedy,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
, first reveals Shakespeare’s flair for mixing romance, realism, lyricism and clowning. This matures in
The Merchant of Venice
and is at its best in
Twelfth Night
. But in each of these three plays there is a dark side that almost spoils the fun.”

It was set in “that ‘ingenious Italy,’ rich in storytelling and the land of lyric love.” Renzo Mongiardino’s sets and Lila de Nobili’s Renaissance costumes looked lovely, but overall the production was
not judged a success, due in large part to problems with the set, as described by A. Alvarez:

Despite Hall’s many “advantages as a Shakespearean director,” understanding of the play and “respect for the language as poetry” and the ability “to force a high standard of verse-speaking on his cast,” Alvarez claimed that

Subsequent productions have eschewed attempts at Renaissance picturesqueness, locating the play in twentieth-century sets and costumes, seeking modern resonances for the play’s
jejeune
qualities. For Robin Phillips’ 1970 production, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre was updated to a 1960s lido with beachwear, sunglasses, and onstage swimming pool. Daphne Dare’s set consisted of “a ramp and steps from mid-stage left and a small pool downstage right. The forest was created by the dropping of a single batten of ropes from the flies and a dappling of the light.”
³³
The play opened with a recording of “Who is Sylvia? Who is Valentine? Who is Proteus? Who is Julia?” and closed with the Beatles’ “All You Need Is Love.” B. A. Young argued that the choice of setting was logical: “Courts being out of fashion in the 20th century, Mr Phillips has sent his young people to a Milanese university where their behaviour fits in very suitably.”
³⁴
Gareth Lloyd Evans believed that “for all the many visual and thematic inconsistencies induced by such a treatment, it seemed to me to have been done in a spirit of affection rather than disdain of this immature play.”
³⁵

3.
Peter Hall’s 1960 production with Lucetta (Mavis Edwards, behind) teasing Julia (Frances Cuka) about her letter, Act 1 Scene 2: “The stage was so littered with ivied ruins and bits of decaying gilded interiors that it looked like an opulent, tinted Piranesi … it contrived to make an immature play seem altogether decadent.”

John Barton’s 1981 production paired Shakespeare’s earliest comedy with his earliest tragedy in a double bill with
Titus Andronicus
. It was a brave experiment that employed a conscious meta-theatricality in its cross-casting and onstage audience. Both plays were severely cut—850 lines from
Titus
and 515 from
Two Gentlemen
. It confused and divided critics. Roger Warren was the most perceptive in his understanding of how the two plays worked together: