Charles Dickens, Peggy Ashcroft, Ben Kingsley, Edmund Kean, James Thurber, and an unidentified high school student were among the many celebrating their love or loathing of Shakespeare at the Folly Theatre this past Saturday night, with both the majority and the minority views pronounced by the actor Roger Rees, in his monologue What You Will. The 90-minute verbal collage of jokes, anecdotes, soliloquies, song, dramatic instruction (the "Shakespeare hop" that many actors feel the need to do at the end of Hamlet's "To be or not to be" speech in leaving the stage) and odd bodkins was presented by the Harriman-Jewell Series. Funny, educational, at times touching (when Rees talked about how losing his father at an early age prepared him for Hamlet's reaching out to his ghost father), the presentation was like a YouTube video for theatre wonks.

Shakespeare, so ubiquitous yet so foreign to so many people, works as well piecemeal as in his entirety. It is not something other playwrights, or writers in general, can always guarantee. A snippet of Tennessee Williams or Albee, even of, say, Beckett, needs some introduction; their plays, whether real or abstract, demand the middle and an end to bridge a brief speech. For all his foreignness and historical background, Shakespeare's plays somehow leap over their specificities. How many people know "To be or not to be" without being able to source the material? Ultimately, they do not need to know: the play, or more specifically, the language, is indeed the thing.

 Rees's presentation, on a stage decorated with a golden throne, a skull atop some books, a bust of Shakespeare and a hodge-podge of books and papers thrown down toward the front of the stage (for Rees to pluck up and read from at will), derives from a lifetime of Bardology. His career at the Royal Shakespeare Company (he told several stories from his apprenticeship years, spent standing mute, as an extra, beside Sir Ben Kingsley) afforded him with the greatest training ground. He has since gone on to act and direct Shakespeare elsewhere; like Hamlet, who sees his father's ghost where others do not, Rees sees Shakespeare everywhere.

His love is not holy; Rees subscribes to the modern view that (as he writes in the program notes) "Shakespeare was just a guy." In rapid fashion, he switched from personal anecdotes to historical critiques by Bernard Shaw, Coleridge and the 18-century critic Hazlitt, then on to ridiculous misinterpretations by students taken from the Internet (misreading Macbeth's "guilt" for "quilt"); his stories, if seemingly random, continually moved toward the view of Shakespeare as a playwright first but a "guy" always. We take his genius for granted, Rees was essentially saying, though with that singularity comes the challenges to understand him and make his world relevant in ours. The bored students, the irritated critics, the lost audience members whom Rees spoke about: they are all part of Shakespeare's mystique, as much as Sir Lawrence Olivier and Ralph Richardson's legendary Old Vic performances.

How then shall we compare Shakespeare to other writers? Rees' answer is: listen. Interspersed with favorable comments by Dickens and a recitation of the comic "Macbeth Murder Mystery" by Thurber (about a woman who tries to read the play like a detective story), Rees moved deftly into ten different soliloquies and Sonnet 18. Listening to him change pace and cadences from modern English to excerpts from Lear, Henry V, Richard II and others showcased the command of language: at those times, Rees the entertainer was subsumed by Rees the actor, and we might have been visited, even blessed, by the playwright's ghost. If so, he was visible (and certainly audible) to everyone following along.


REVIEW
Harriman-Jewell Series
Roger Rees "What You Will"
Saturday, November 21, 2009
The Folly Theater
12^th and Central, Kansas City, MO
www.harriman-jewell.org

By Steve Shapiro

Theatre Contributor (Past writer)
Steve Shapiro has been writing about the arts for over twenty-five years. He wrote and broadcast a weekly radio book review on KCUR-FM for ten years, and has contributed to NPR's Morning Edition book segment.

As a contributor to local publications such as KCMetropolis.org, KC Tribune.com, The Kansas City Star, Review, The Pitch, and Helicon 9, he has published essays and criticism on art, books, cinema, theater and the cultural Zeitgeist.

A chapter on the museum architects Frank Lloyd Wright and Steven Holl was published in the anthology, The Sixth Surface: Steven Holl Lights the Nelson-Atkins Museum (2007). On the side, he juggles Dachshunds and is available to moderate book groups.