THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN (Shakespeare Happy Hours)***

 

By Cal

Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52zWz0WsGjY

Available until: Indefinitely

I don’t think I’d want to live in Shakespeare’s time. It probably wasn’t as hard for the people as it seems to us now, but if I’d lived in Shakespeare’s time, my family wouldn’t have adopted me, I couldn’t marry my boyfriend (except maybe if one of us was as adept at cross-dressing as Viola and Rosalind), my brother Angel would probably have died when he was a baby and my sister Megan would be disabled and couldn’t have learned to dance. We really are very lucky in modern times, though of course not everyone has been as lucky as us. I really hope that, in the future, a lot more people will be lucky. It’s true that in 2020, we are fighting against disease, prejudice and very questionable political decisions, but all that happened in Shakespeare’s time too. We know that from his plays.

But one thing I think I would have enjoyed about living in Shakespeare’s time would be waiting for the next Shakespeare play to come out and wondering what he’d write next. Theatre was much more inclusive then too – there was standing room available for a penny.

Discovering a new Shakespeare play was something I obviously never expected to happen. Not unless we worked out how to bring people back to life. Or unless my mum’s A Level English teacher was right and Shakespeare was an alien. Maybe there’s a whole planet of Shakespeares out there. But after being told quite definitely that Shakespeare wrote thirty-seven plays, I was shocked but delighted when I discovered two more had been attributed to him. Both are collaborations, which perhaps explains why some experts don’t accept them as part of the canon, but others have accepted them and both have been published and performed as ‘Shakespeare plays’. These plays are Edward III and his final known play, The Two Noble Kinsmen.

There are other plays of Shakespeare’s which have been lost including Love’s Labours Won (imagine the irony if it had been called Love’s Labour’s Found) – I don’t want to be too greedy, but I hope that one day, these plays might be rediscovered too. Even if it’s not in my lifetime.

The Two Noble Kinsmen begins on the day of Theseus’ wedding to Hippolyta, a day which also features in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If The Two Noble Kinsmen happened before the Dream lovers are found, I can see why Theseus changed his mind so totally about his plans for Hermia. He doesn’t want another situation like The Two Noble Kinsmen. (Not that there needs to be any consistency between the two plays, but I have always been quite surprised by Theseus’ abrupt change of mind at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. If anything, you’d expect him to be angrier, not more forgiving.)

The Two Noble Kinsmen is not quite what you might term typical Shakespeare. It’s his sort of plot (apart from the ending), but the language seems less poetic, few striking speeches stand out and although there is some good characterisation in this performance, it seems to come more from the actors than the text. The ending isn’t what you’d expect from Shakespeare either when so much of the play is light-hearted, but it follows the story it was based on (I won’t tell you what it is as it’s a bit of a spoiler – though you might recognise the names if you know the original story). I wonder if Shakespeare might have used a different ending if it was completely his choice. We know he’s not above changing plots. He’s even known to rewrite history. Literally.

The two title characters are the very attractive Palamon and Arcite (which is pronounced in the rudest possible way), cousins and best friends, who get on very well until they become one of many pairs of friends to fall in love with the same girl. Arcite (Daniel Kemper) is the calmer of the two, more introspective perhaps, but certainly decisive. Montgomery Sutton plays the more hot-headed Palamon, who feels things more deeply, whether it’s anger with his friend or the unadulterated pleasure of a good meal. Both characters have good and bad qualities, but the actors ensure that they’re generally likeable, as well as funny. Kemper and Sutton also have a bit of a bromance which is very enjoyable to watch and are inventive in their staging of the play, both creating their own prison bars (I will not speculate about why Sutton appears to own a set of handcuffs).

The object of their affections is Emilia, played by Jennifer Jackson. To begin with, she seems completely in control of the situation. Flirtatious but never going beyond a certain point. Sensible and intelligent. If she’d been allowed to remain in control, things could have been very different.

Presiding over proceedings as the aforementioned Theseus and Hippolyta are Emma Pallant and Deb Kinghorn, who are more than talented enough to ensure that I spent no more than a minute or so feeling excited about the impending marriage of Jack Cade and King Henry from Shakespeare Happy Hours’ King Henry VI series. Pallant is regal and magnificent as Theseus, quietly but inexorably in control. I almost fancied her. Kinghorn is gentle, relaxed and very feminine. So different from Henry in every way.

Another story follows the unnamed Gaoler’s Daughter, who helps Palamon, falls in love with him and then goes mad. Laura Piccoli was endearingly innocent in this role – she loses touch with reality but remains the same character. I enjoyed her singing and dancing too. In the chat after the performance, Piccoli expressed understandable discomfort at the idea that sex might cure the Gaoler’s Daughter’s mental illness. It sounds very wrong to me too, but you could say that about the treatment of psychiatric illness in a lot of great plays. George III in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III (and in the film version, The Madness of King George) is physically tortured and mentally bullied. Things had improved significantly by the time Peter Shaffer’s Equus was published, but many of the techniques were still questionable, such as when the psychiatrist invites his seventeen year old patient to visit his office late at night, then gives him drugs under false pretences and encourages him to remove his clothes. Two great plays which I love a lot, but you can’t say everything the doctors do is right.

However, I think it’s also important we keep watching these plays to help us see and understand how badly we got it wrong in the past and how much progress has been made… and how much progress hasn’t been made. I think when we’re watching a play, we will often watch terrible things and not mind so much because it is just a play, but at the same time, something in our brain tells us this is wrong and we remember that after the play is over.

We’re shocked now that sex is seen as a cure for the Gaoler’s Daughter’s madness, but perhaps the most shocking thing is that it’s kind of still happening today. I have been given permission to tell you that I know an asexual person who was told by their therapist that they ought to be having sex. This person ignored the advice and ditched the therapist, but I wonder how many vulnerable people are consenting to unwanted sexual experiences because their therapists told them to. I think plays can not only educate you about the past with regards to mental health, they can also show you how wrong some current behaviours and opinions are.

Other people who stood out in this brilliant cast are Kathy Sommisch’s good-humoured Gaoler, Ella Mock’s hilarious fangirl countryman and Dylan Kammerer’s Wooer, more heartbroken by the Gaoler’s Daughter’s illness than happy that it proves such ‘good news’ for him.