Kenneth Branagh is our greatest
living
Shakespearean - and that's
official. Michael Billington on why he
won
the Golden Quill
On
Sunday Kenneth Branagh won the
Golden
Quill, established by the
Washington-based Shakespeare Guild to
honour
the "greatest Shakespearean of
our
day". Clearly the guild's founder, John
F
Andrews, has a wry sense of humour.
After
praising the 38-year-old Branagh for
introducing Shakespeare to a new
generation through his films, he goes on:
"In
the process Mr Branagh has revived
the
sagging fortunes of a 435-year-old
has-been and turned him into today's
hottest screenwriter."
It is
significant that the award is American
and is
given to Branagh primarily for his
movies. In blasé Britain, where
Shakespeare is still theatrically available
and
where Branagh-bashing is a popular
sport,
we have no idea of the impact the
Belfast boy's movies have made in the
US. I
was in Chicago when Branagh's
Renaissance Theatre Company was
playing King Lear and Midsummer Night's
Dream.
The theatre was packed with
young
people, and at a panel on playing
Shakespeare, in which Branagh took part,
people
talked about the Henry V movie
with a
glowing gratitude you wouldn't find
in
Britain. Americans, quite simply, have a
hunger
for Shakespeare which their
theatre cannot begin to satisfy.
But
Branagh doesn't merely have three
Shakespeare movies made, with Love's
Labour's Lost and Macbeth still to come.
He
has, in at least two of those cases,
created a film that is comparable in
linguistic richness and density of texture
to a
theatrical experience. Praising
Branagh for making a movie that is like a
play
may seem a backhanded
compliment, but in a medium where
adapting Shakespeare usually involves
textual dilution, Branagh has shown you
can
preserve the values of the original and
still
make exciting cinema.
Filming Shakespeare is always difficult.
The
Russian director Grigori Kozintsev
once
summed up the orthodox cinematic
view:
"The problem is not one of finding
means
to speak the verse in front of the
camera... The aural has to be made
visual. The poetic texture itself has to be
transformed into a visual poetry, into the
dynamic organisation of film imagery."
This
is easier if you're working in a
language other than English; it's what
Kozintsev himself did in Hamlet,
Kurosawa in Throne of Blood - and Orson
Welles
in his sequence of Shakespeare
movies, by treating the text as if it were in
another tongue.
Branagh, however, has found a way of
preserving the text and yet keeping the
film
visually alive. In Henry V, Derek
Jacobi's Chorus, wandering through the
battle-scenes like an ironic commentator,
keeps
the language constantly in front of
us.
Contrast the Olivier version, in which
the
Chorus is gradually reduced to an
off-screen voice. Even more remarkable is
the
Branagh Hamlet, where we get a
powerful image of Elsinore as a vast hall
of
mirrors and a place of imprisoning
confinement, and the full four-hour text,
which
reminds us that the prince is part of
a
larger pattern.
Branagh has preserved the
Shakespearean experience and yet
produced popular cinema. What we forget,
however, is that the Branagh movies,
which
triggered off a whole new cycle and
made
Shakespeare cinematically sexy,
owe
their exis tence to the Renaissance
Theatre Company. Read Branagh's
premature biography, Beginning, and you
discover that, even as he was planning a
Renaissance theatre season comprising
Hamlet, Much Ado About Nothing and As
You
Like It, he was insisting that filming
on
Henry V start the second it was
finished. The momentum created by the
theatre project carried through into the
movie.
It also helped that Branagh had
already played Henry V for Adrian Noble
at the
RSC and understood the rhythm of
the
role.
In
short, Shakespeare on screen often
depends on a pre-existing theatrical
culture: both Branagh and Olivier used
their
regular team of actors and even Baz
Luhrmann's high-concept Romeo + Juliet
was
the product of a group who had grown
up
together at drama school in Sydney.
As
ever, cinema feeds off theatre. But if
Branagh amply deserves his Golden Quill,
it is
not just for his remarkable chutzpah
and
energy. It is for showing that you can
do
Shakespeare on screen without
sacrificing his density and richness and
without relentlessly transforming the aural
into
the visual. Imaginatively handled, the
aural
becomes the visual.