Stage fright

Cinemas are filled with movie adaptations of Shakespeare's plays. But why has no one tackled the works of his equally interesting successors? It's a tragedy, says Alex Cox

Alex Cox
Guardian

Friday August 9, 2002

These days it seems possible to get almost anything made into a movie if it was written by a bloke called Shakespeare. Even his weaker works - Titus Andronicus, for example - get made into $20m features. In the space of five years, we've seen Mel Gibson, Kenneth Branagh and Ethan Hawke play Hamlet. How many more Danes do we need?

Don't get me wrong: I've nothing against the Bard. But why are Big Bill's plays a shoo-in with studios and foreign sales agents, while those of his playwriting successors - Middleton, Webster, Jonson and Tourneur - remain apparently ignored?

Jacobean tragedies are highly popular at the RSC and the National. Any production of The Duchess of Malfi or The Changeling is likely to draw good houses and favourable reviews. It is only the large casts that these plays demand that deter touring companies and provincial theatres from staging them just as often. The White Devil is currently the sold-out favourite of the summer theatre season in far-off Ashland, Oregon.

Yet as far as I am aware, my interpretation of Thomas Middleton's The Revenger's Tragedy, completed last year, marks the first instance of a Jacobean tragedy being made into a feature film. The only other recent adaptation that springs to mind was a version of The Changeling starring Elizabeth McGovern and Bob Hoskins - but that was made for TV and shown more than a decade ago.

So why then the modern cinema's emphasis on Shakespeare, and its exclusion of the equally poetic, equally exciting, often more interesting Jacobean theatre that followed him? It's not as if there is no audience for it. Revenger's and other Jacobean tragedies are constantly on our exam syllabi, which means that there is a solid student audience for such films, both in the cinema and on VHS and DVD.

Nor can we blame the "difficult" language - it is closer, after all, to our own than Shakespeare's was. And it can't be the outdated themes, either: these plays are mostly about sex and violence, which are, to put it mildly, popular and contemporary subjects. I suspect it is that old devil politics that frightens studio- financed producers, and keeps this great unlooted treasure-house of drama off our screens.

Permit me to explain. One of the reasons Shakespeare was so popular in his day - apart from being the greatest poet in the English language - was that he worked as a propagandist for the Tudors. This lot, two Henrys and an Elizabeth, were (the silly film Elizabeth notwithstanding) a horrific bunch. Having killed the actual king, a northern lad called Richard, they set about consolidating power in southern England and creating the centralised spy-church-and-police state that we enjoy today. In 1569 the poorer classes of the north rose up in revolt against landowners who were seizing public lands for private use. The Northern Rebellion was put down with liberal use of torture, hanging and decapitation.

It was a hideously reactionary time. But contemporaneously with it, in the freer civil society of London, a modern form of theatre was beginning to emerge. Medieval-style morality plays and translations of Seneca were giving way to an authentic English-speaking drama. It was strong and exciting stuff - expecially in the hands of such brilliant dramatists as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, who depicted the abovementioned horrors live on stage. And it did not escape the attention of Elizabeth Tudor and her spies.

In 1586, around the time that Kyd's Spanish Tragedy was first performed, the Privy Council warranted a propaganda fund of £1,000 a year, to be paid annually to the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. The purpose of the fund was to promote the interests of the Tudors - and their successors - in plays and poetry.

Theatre people didn't make much money then - or now - and it is reasonable to assume that a young actor-writer called Shakespeare was one of the beneficiaries of that fund. Such a relationship would explain the mystery surrounding De Vere, which has led certain eccentrics to claim him as the author of Big Bill's plays.

Even if Shakespeare wasn't on the Tudor payroll, he had another very real reason to toe the party line: the fate of his immediate predecessors. In 1593, Marlowe was stabbed by government agents in a bar fight, and Kyd was arrested on trumped-up charges and tortured. Marlowe stood accused of atheism; Kyd's crime was basically being Marlowe's pal. In 1594, Shakespeare wrote Richard III, a play falsely depicting the Tudors' defeated adversary as a child-murdering hunchback. As the broken Kyd died of his injuries, Shakespeare's star rose.

In the years that followed, Bill developed his number-one theme: that there was no crime greater than regicide, the killing of a king (unless the king was Richard III, of course). The greatest dramas of his mature years - Julius Caesar, Hamlet and Macbeth - are all variants on this theme. But no regime lasts for ever. Elizabeth dragged England into a five-year Irish war which exhausted the nation and her popularity. In 1603 she died and was replaced by a weaker monarch, James I, who quickly ended the ongoing war with Spain.

Despite the various plots against him, James didn't have his predecessors' appetite for theatrical censorship. Language was changing, becoming closer to the English that we speak today. And Shakespeare's students - young men like Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton - were writing dramas of their own. In 1606, against a background of further insurrection in the north, Shakespeare wrote Macbeth. It is of course a great play, but it was written to flatter James I, a descendant of Banquo, and it tells us once again how terrible it is to kill a rightful king. Young Middleton helped Shakespeare pen the witches' songs in Macbeth, then wrote a very different drama of his own. First performed the same year, it was called The Revenger's Tragedy.

The Revenger's Tragedy is, if you like, the anti-Hamlet. It tells the story of Vindici (played in our film by Christopher Eccleston), who, impoverished and dispossessed, returns to court to murder the villainous duke. There is no suggestion that the duke is an illegitimate ruler like Hamlet's Uncle Claudius. He is simply bad, and deserves killing. But the rebellious tone of the play doesn't stop there. Vindici dislikes the idea of inheritance and succession, and decides to murder the Duke's son Lussurioso as well.

Admittedly, Lussurioso (Eddie Izzard in our movie) lusts after Vindici's innocent sister, Castiza (Carla Henry). But that is the extent of his crimes. Vindici wants to kill Lussurioso basically because he is a rich man's son. And why not? Middleton seems to ask. Once Lussurioso is out of the way, the whole clan self-destructs. One man and his brother (Carlo/Hippolito, played in our film by Drew Schofield), armed only with knives and poison, bring down a corrupt political dynasty.

"Great men were gods, if beggars couldn't kill 'em!" Vindici exclaims at one point in this, the first British black comedy. It was not a message we ever heard from Shakespeare, who, increasingly fretful about the fate of kings, retreated into the ruminations of King Lear and a litigious retirement. Nor is it the message we hear nowadays from Hollywood - or from the British financiers who seek to ape Los Angeles' increasingly reactionary, triumphalist and imperious fodder.

But as the studios limp from one disaster to another, with their bad, bloated films, their failed internet ventures and their increasingly creative accounting, perhaps it's time for us to view ourselves the way we did in the far-off 1970s, when we still had a respectable national cinema: as different from the Americans, rather than as their pale shadows, purveying only dim-witted comedies and chirpy cockney gangster films.

The shakiness of the studios and the collapse of the would-be studio at Channel 4 may be a very good thing indeed. It might just encourage us - as independent, British film-makers - to reject what the Pentagon calls "full-spectrum dominance" and to go our own lean and inventive way, drawing on the untapped resources of our national drama, which is the greatest in the world.

Revengers Tragedy had its international premiere three days ago, at the Locarno film festival; it plays Edinburgh in two weeks' time; and opens - after a National Schools Week run - in February of next year. It may succeed, or fail. But what I hope Revengers will have done is open the doors to something that is uniquely British and of great interest to British film-makers: the gaping, skeleton- and sex- and joke-filled vault that is Renaissance tragedy.

Stage audiences love The Duchess and The White Devil and The Changeling, because they're sexually charged, violent, dramatic, political, fearless, and funny - often all at once. It's possible that film audiences might love them too.

Next year I'd like to direct The Spanish Tragedy with Derek Jacobi on stage, and film it. After that I wouldn't half mind directing Frank Cottrell Boyce's adaptation of Middleton's feminist tragicomedy, Women Beware Women.

It seems impossible right now. The producers of Revengers, no doubt quite rightly, tell me that the time isn't right yet for another Jacobean revenge movie. But times change. And, as Middleton and Shakespeare both saw, sometimes they change very rapidly.

· Revengers Tragedy plays in Edinburgh on August 21 and 24, and is released in 2003.