Free The Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare Page B

Crab as “a most economically paced performance.” 66 In Buffini’s 2004 production Lance was played by Andrew Melville, “a lachrymose Scot and his dog Crab, an elderly Irish wolfhound, whose only crime on stage was to yawn—
not
fair comment.” 67
    Conclusion
    In his discussion of the play, quoted in the 1992 program, Stanley Wells concludes that it is “a failure” but it is “far from being a total failure.”
    [The] most important reason for the play’s success is that however immature he may be in other ways, he [Shakespeare] is already completely assured as a writer of comic prose, of lyrical verse, and even sometimes of genuine dramatic verse. When we try to get below the surface of the play, we find that it rests on shaky foundations. In these circumstances, the best thing to do seems to be to come up to the surface again and examine that. 68
    Successful productions have done just that; they have attended to the play’s surface, updating it with contemporary settings and ideas to suggest modern parallels, which, far from detracting from the text have enabled its virtues of vigor, freshness, and lyrical charm to shine through.
THE DIRECTOR’S CUT: INTERVIEWS WITH DAVID THACKER AND EDWARD HALL
    David Thacker was born in Northamptonshire in 1950. He was the artistic director of the Young Vic from 1984 to 1993, where his directorial achievements included
The Jail Diary of Albie Sachs, Stags and Hens, Macbeth, Hamlet, Measure for Measure, The Enemies Within, The Crucible, Romeo and Juliet, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Some Kind of Hero, Ghosts, Julius Caesar
, and
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
He directed the production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
discussed below for the RSC in 1991, and became director-in-residence for the company in 1993. He is a prolific television director and is currently the artistic director of the Octagon Theatre, Bolton. He has won Olivier Awards for Best Director (
Pericles
) and Best Revival (
Pericles
) and the London Fringe Award for Best Director (
Ghosts
) and Best Production (
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?
).
    Edward Hall , son of the RSC’s founder Sir Peter Hall, was born in 1967 and trained at Leeds University and the Mountview Theatre School before cutting his teeth at the Watermill Theatre in the 1990s. His first Shakespearean success was a production of
Othello
in 1995, though he used the experience as inspiration to found Propeller, an all-male theater company with whom he directed
The Comedy of Errors
and
Henry V
, which ran together in repertory during the 1997–98 season, and
Twelfth Night
in 1999, all at the Watermill. In 1998 he made his directorial debut with the RSC on the production of
The Two Gentlemen of Verona
discussed below, and went on to work with the company on
Henry V
in 2000–01 and
Julius Caesar
the following season. In between
Henry
and
Caesar
, Hall returned to the Watermill to direct
Rose Rage
, his (in)famous and celebrated abattoir-set adaptation of the
Henry VI
trilogy. He has continued to work withPropeller on such productions as
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
in 2003 and
Twelfth Night
and
The Taming of the Shrew
in
2007
, becoming artistic director of the Hampstead Theatre in 2010.
    Two Gents is regarded as an early play, an apprentice piece, in which characters and plot are not fully realized; did this perception affect your production in any way?
    Thacker: I think it’s an exceptionally good play. I’ve liked it since the first time I encountered it. There may have been people who thought, because of the imaginative choices we took in our production, that I felt the play needed shoring up in some way, but that was never the case. I think it is self-evidently a young person’s play, written by a young man; it has a lot of the enthusiasm and spontaneity of youth, and also the innocence of youth. I felt that the style of it was very pure and shows Shakespeare at an advanced stage in his development.
    Hall: No, not really. There is a