In Search of Shakespeare: the Producer
Maya Vision Crew
There is a cartoon on the wall in my office that has two people talking at a cocktail party. Person A is saying to Person B "I'm confused now. Was Shakespeare somebody else or was somebody else Shakespeare?"
Everybody told us that making a documentary on Shakespeare was going to be difficult/impossible/boring or all three. We were urged to avoid arts programming, stick to history and use re-enactment if we wanted anyone to watch. We were told we had to deal with the authorship question and have been bombarded with mail from the supporters of Marlowe, Bacon. the Earl of Oxford, Queen Elizabeth I and even a 16th century Russian author! We were also warned that the whole enterprise would drive us mad and there were certainly times along the way when it seemed as if that particular prophecy was coming true. But just to be serious for a moment we took this on because we all thought it was important. Now I know that it is "only television" but I still believe in the wonderful and democratic possibilities of Broad casting.
Film crew in Warwickshire
So we set ourselves a number of tasks: 1) To try open up the world of Shakespeare to a wider audience. 2) To try to say something new about the Shakespeare biography and contribute in a small way to the scholarship. 3) To try to show how historians do their work. So instead of presenting a seamless narrative we tried to show that 'doing' history is a more complex undertaking: How you pursue sources which sometimes take you up blind alleys. How sometimes even after thorough investigation you still don't know. How hypothesis can be generated which others can look at to advance the scholarship. 4) To look at Britain with the same eyes that we had used to look at South America in 'Conquistadors' and South East Asia in 'Alexander'. So the beauty of the countryside and buildings was lovingly captured by our cameraman Peter Harvey. And we recorded the Mystery plays in York and Lincoln in much the same way as we had shot folk plays in the High Andes. 5) To incorporate excerpts of the plays into the documentary life in such a way as to let the life and the work inform each other and to give a general audience a taste of the sheer fun, exuberance and emotion to be found in the works of Shakespeare.
No small set of tasks and of course even though we tried we didn't fully succeed. But I think the trying was important. The films seem to me to work on an emotional level and the series builds and leaves one closer to the man, his world and his work. Of course television is a medium in which we film makers nearly always have to compromise, as we beg for more time on screen to tell the story or tear our hair out trying to come up with the pictures to carry the ideas. But the fact that Michael wrote such an excellent book to accompany the series means that many of the issues which we touched on in the films were explored at much greater length and detail in print.
RSC Players script reading
And how did producing Shakespeare compare to 'Alexander' or 'Conqistadors'. How did it rank with persuading Afghan warlords to lend us their helicopters or asking the Iranian police to release our film crews or pouring over GPS co ordinates trying to locate a lost crew in the jungles of Peru? Well - the M40 can be very tricky and you can easily get lost in the props department of the RSC and I definitely needed a translator in the latin class at King Edward's grammar school!! But actually, I loved it. It was so wonderful to be working back in this country, dealing with big ideas, meeting the scholars and craftsmen and local people who helped us so unstintingly to try to imagine the world of William Shakespeare. And then there were the actors. The RSC tour was a blast from start to finish. It was fantastic being on the road with the company and watching them performing at the highest level in the very places where Shakespeare's company played. At the end of the week however I was left with one unanswered question - How do these people manage to eat so much? As my Granny used to say 'I'd rather keep them for a week than a fortnight'.
Maya Vision Crew film The Royal Shakespeare Company
At the beginning of the First Folio Shakespeare's friends, fellow actors and members of the company Hemmings and Condell wrote: 'We have but collected them (the plays) and done our offices to the dead without ambition either of selfe profit or fame, onely to keep the memory of so worthy a friend and fellow alive as was our Shakespeare'. Thank goodness they did or many of the plays would be lost today, but 400 years later I hope that 'In Search of Shakespeare' does a little bit towards keeping the memory alive and introducing the next generation to the greatest playwright the world has ever known.