December 13, 1998
It sounds like heresy coming from a dyed-in-the-wool Shakespearean actor like Joseph Fiennes, but given his druthers, Fiennes would call for a five-year moratorium on the Bard's plays. "At least the very popular ones. It's refreshing to hear something more obscure like Troilus & Cressida once in a while," says the Royal Shakespeare Company alumnus and brother of Ralph Fiennes. "But when you're onstage doing Hamlet or Macbeth and you hear someone mumbling the monologue along with you, it is rather off-putting. "Certainly, something like Romeo And Juliet, which is studied, you want to feel like the audience is hearing it for the first time, and that is impossible." Under most circumstances, at least.
Salvation for Fiennes came in the form of Shakespeare In Love, (opening Friday). It's the comic tale by Tom Stoppard (Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead), which presents Romeo And Juliet as a work-in-progress with the working-title Romeo And Ethel The Pirate's Daughter. The movie, an allegory of modern showbiz, finds desperate young Will Shakespeare (Fiennes) plagued by writer's block, all the while making up crass story points like the aforementioned pirate to appease debt-ridden theatre owner Phillip Henslowe (Shine's Geoffrey Rush). Financial salvation appears in the form of a starstruck 16th-century loan-shark named Hugh Fennyman (Tom Wilkinson). He's an archetypal "producer" who introduces himself to people with the line, "I'm the money." Creative salvation is a trickier matter.
Will lifts plot points from his rival Christopher Marlowe (Rupert Everett), cajoles a vain actor (Ben Affleck) to join the play for his marquee value and steals turns of phrase from everyone he meets. However, what really makes the clouds lift from the blocked Will Shakespeare is his "Romeo," a young man named Tom Kent who is actually a noblewoman named Viola De Lesseps (Gwyneth Paltrow). Women in Elizabethan times were banned from the stage, so Viola's deception is the height of scandal. And Will and Viola's affair becomes the comic template for one of the English language's greatest romances.
"Tom (Stoppard) always felt that the parallel between what was essentially the beginnings of showbusiness in the late 16th century and modern showbusiness were irresistible, really," says director John Madden. "They weren't parallels you particularly had to force, because the values were so similar. "We now think of anything Shakespeare wrote as being literature, but it was entertainment at the time. And a lot of the imperatives that he was writing to were very similar to the ones we have now. It's written by a writer about a writer, so the insights seem to me to be sound."
Indeed, the progress of Shakespeare In Love to the screen has a few absurdist elements of its own. It was taken from an idea by freelance writer Marc Norman, who, as the scripter of the legendary bomb Cutthroat Island, presumably knows a thing or two about gratuitous pirate plots. The Stoppard script landed in the hands of director Edward Zwick (The Siege, Legends Of The Fall), who in true Hollywood style decided Stoppard's dialogue needed improving by Zwick's good friend Susan Shilliday, who co-wrote Legends Of The Fall. "That was the first version I read," says Paltrow with an embarrassed, guilty laugh. "Not that there's anything wrong with the lady that wrote Legends Of The Fall, but it's sort of hilarious that anyone could deign to rewrite Tom Stoppard."
Zwick ran into production problems when he tried to film the script in 1993. He stayed on as producer, handing the reins to Madden, a Brit who turned the project into a fun piece for anyone of note who had ever delivered a soliloquy, including all the aforementioned actors plus Dame Judi Dench here playing Queen Elizabeth I. Says Madden: "I'm quite pleased to say that the movie didn't cost an exorbitant amount of money, because a lot of people that worked on it with me are from the British stage tradition of doing more with less."
In fact, Paltrow was the only one of the lot who'd never played Shakespeare, though Madden says you'd never know it from the way she took to her gender-bending role. "She's never performed it, but she has an instinctive understanding of language. And we did quite a bit of work in rehearsal with Shakespearean language structure and cadence, and she picked up on that incredibly fast. "She has the ability to transform herself into another culture and another place," Madden says, laughing, "and she snaps out of it as soon as the take's over and words like 'awesome!' come out of her mouth." Moreover, he adds, "she makes a wonderful boy."
Which speaks to one of the trickier aspects of the film, especially given those Shakespeare sonnets that appear to have been written to a young man. "I mean clearly the whole piece is playing with gender all the time, with men kissing men and moustaches meeting moustaches and so forth. I decided not to push it and let the sexual ambiguity take care of itself. It would have been very easy to get sidetracked here." Theatre and film are not necessarily happy bedfellows. "And I was very attracted in this film by the idea of doing theatre justice as a magical place without being smug and self-congratulatory. "So it was structured with bawdy, extremely vulgar moments brushing up against more elevated ones."
Going back to Stoppard's original script was the key to Madden's participation, "since he wrote it entirely through the lens of a mature Shakespeare comedy." "You have your love at first sight, romantic infatuation, which then passes through a period of complication. Then mortality rears its head, as it does in most Shakespeare comedies, and that changes the experience of love into something different. And of course, irresistibly and gloriously, it's resolved with deus ex machina -- with the intervention of the Monarch."
By JIM SLOTEK, Toronto Sun NEW YORK
