Venus & Adonis
RSC artistic director Michael Boyd seems determined to try and shake off the dusty, old-fashioned image sometimes associated with his company. And despite the traditional tragedies some experimental and innovative pieces have been offered this season with the Spanish Golden Age, the new work festival and now this, the RSC’s first ever collaboration with a puppet company, Islington’s Little Angel Theatre, in the form of Venus and Adonis.
The theatre itself is rather sweet, like a small chapel with a gilded and embellished miniature pros arch stage. It’s here that RSC associate Gregory Doran has taken Shakespeare’s epic poem and conceived it for puppets drawing inspiration from Japanese Bunraku puppet theatre and Jacobean Masque (although the only conceivable link to masque seems to be in John Woolf‘s music).
After an unnecessary (and somewhat twee for my taste) first scene which is set to Shakespeare’s introduction – with Queen Elizabeth, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton, the patron for whom Shakespeare wrote this and who some (including Doran) suspect he was in love with – the piece gets under way.
Venus, the goddess of love falls under her own spell when she sees Adonis, a mortal. ‘She’s love, she loves, yet she is not loved’; it’s a classic tale of unrequited love, narrated by Michael Pennington with the puppets handled by five skilled puppeteers.
Despite having high puppet standards after His Dark Materials I was not disappointed, the three varieties of puppets – stringed, stringless and shadow – are impressive and used to great effect. The piece is mined for its humour and there are several charming instances where the narrator and puppets interact, this works to help the audience suspend their disbelief.
But ultimately of course the puppets are not human and in sections of rhetoric the impulse is to watch the speaker, which you do, while the moments of high emotion can only ever go so far. I also found it distracting at first that the puppeteer’s faces were not masked, this is a conscious decision but again with lifeless puppet faces the instinct is to look at the intent human ones.
That said there are many clever – if gimmicky – moments. Doran conjures just enough magic, he even manages a deus ex machina of sorts, and at one hour it’s timed perfectly to leave you satiated and not bored. Be warned though it’s not one for the kids, thanks to a few racy sections it’s unsuitable for under 14s, but it is fun and a good way into Shakespeare’s poetry. It can next be seen at Stratford’s too long ignored Other Place Theatre.
– Hannah Kennedy
