Ian McKellen performs as King Lear, and Sylvester McCoy as the Fool, in Shakespeare's King Lear.
KING LEAR:
(Laughs) To take 't again perforce — Monster ingratitude!
FOOL:
If you were my fool, nuncle, I'd have thee beaten for being old before thy time.
ABC's Behind The News presenter Nathan Bazley narrates.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
There is no doubt that these guys are performing Shakespeare. They're old, they're yelling at each other, and, for the life of me, I can't work out what they're on about.
FOOL:
She will taste as like this as a crab does to a crab.
# TECHNO BEAT
Three actors in gaudy Elizabethan costumes perform on stage with handheld microphones. Behind them is a colourful circus-like marquee.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
But what about these guys?
ACTOR 1:
(Raps) # And a punk named Iago who made himself a menace / He got beef with Othello, the Moor of V-V-Venice. #
NATHAN BAZLEY:
Well, believe it or not, this rap is part of The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare — a fun production that fits all his plays into one. This really is Shakespeare with his name in lights.
Above the stage, marquee lights spell out 'William Shakespeare'.
Nathan interviews the three actors on the stage.
ACTOR 2:
The response we've had from the schools audiences have been amazing. And I sit in the audience to start with, um, and I can hear people beforehand going 'Oh, this is going to be boring' and 'I hate Shakespeare' and I just think, 'Oh, I cannot wait until you see what we're going to do.'
NATHAN BAZLEY:
But before we get into the future of Shakespeare, let's look all the way back into his past.
# ELECTRONIC BEAT
Portraits of William Shakespeare.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
William Shakespeare was a scriptwriter and poet who is widely regarded as the best ever. That's big praise, but he deserves it. Over his lifetime, Shakespeare wrote around 37 plays and 154 poems. And many of them are still being performed today, 400 years later.
Footage from Disney's animation The Lion King. The meerkat Timon approaches a mossy log.
TIMON:
Hey, this looks like a good spot to rustle up some grub.
Timon cracks the log open and Simba the lion cub and Pumbaa the warthog peer tentatively Inside. They see an assortment of grubs and bugs twitching and squeaking.
SIMBA:
Eugh, what's that?
TIMON:
A grub. What's it look like?
SIMBA:
Eugh! Gross!
Timon sucks his fingers, delighted.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
Even modern movies like the Lion King are adaptions of his work.
PUMBAA:
Slimy yet satisfying.
Interview with the three actors from The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare.
ACTOR 1:
There's a reason why they've stuck around for 400 years, is because the stories are just fantastic. And even, you know, some of the histories, they're not dry and bland. He's really sort of amped them up so that they're exciting and they have all these fantastic characters that he injected into them to make them theatrical and fun to watch.
Shots of props from The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare — a mannequin made of pillows, a hand puppet, golden human skulls with glowing eyes, and lurid, colourful wigs.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
Just looking at some of the props used in his production proves Shakespeare has all the plot lines of a Hollywood action flick.
Actor 2 holds a human skull which has comically bulging eyes.
ACTOR 2:
Whenever people think of Shakespeare, one of the first images they see is, kind of, this in their mind, which is Hamlet going, 'Alas, poor Yorick. I knew him well.' He doesn't know him that well anymore.
Actor 1 is dressed as a chef. He holds a meat cleaver in one hand and a bloodied white cloth in the other.
ACTOR 1:
This is Titus Andronicus, which is Shakespeare's first tragedy. And he kills him and bakes him in a pie and serves it to his mother at a dinner party. So we've sort of turned it into a bit of a MasterChef sort of theme.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
But despite the violence and comedy in his plays, a lot of kids don't look forward to studying his works…
John Bell performs as King Lear on stage opposite Susan Prior as Cordelia.
KING LEAR:
I fear I am not in my perfect mind. Methinks I should know you.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
..and a lot of the reason for that comes down to the language. Shakespeare's writing may seem hard to understand, but it's just how sentences were written back then. It'd be like someone trying to perform a play on your tech-speak in the future.
ACTOR 2:
The first time you see it, you're like, 'What on earth?' But as soon as you click your mind in, with all the 'LOL's and 'ROFL's and all this, you totally get it!
NATHAN BAZLEY:
So, is Shakespeare still relevant today? Well, these guys certainly think so.
Interview with the three actors from The Complete Works Of William Shakespeare.
ACTOR 3:
We've got, you know, Juliet's kind of a, like, teenage girl, and Romeo's kind of part emo. The stories are basically transportable from time to time.
NATHAN BAZLEY:
Which is a good indication we'll be seeing Shakespeare shows like this one for another 400 years to come.