Brush Up Your Shakespeare, You Clowns!
MöcShplat & the Black Theatre Workshop's 40th season
Shakespeare is hard enough to understand in English, if indeed it is English: Forsooth! Ay me! And who would fardels bear? To the uninitiated ear it may as well be gibberish. But if the play’s the thing, and all is needed is a dumb show put on by a poor player who struts and frets his hour on the stage, then why not perform in gibberish and let the play speak for itself?
Enter Clowns Gone Bad, a rag-taggle group of clowns, makeup and everything, who just over a decade ago produced a wonderful play called MöcShplat at Montreal’s Fringe Festival. It had been remounted before. But now its originators are back to foist this feast for the eyes and ears on new audiences.
MöcShplat is a tale told not by an idiot, but by this group of clever clowns who devised a new way to perform Shakespeare’s Macbeth: in their own, made-up, gibberish-based language. “Shakespeare,” reads the Geordie Theatre website, “in a language you can finally understand.”
One need not be familiar with Shakespeare’s “Scottish play,” but it helps. One thing’s certain, though; you’ll come away laughing yourself silly. You begin to understand the language quite quickly, as The Bard’s poetry gets translated into silliness that makes just as much sense. “Macbeth shall never vanquish'd be,” an apparition warns in the original, “until Great Birnam wood to high Dunsinane hill shall come against him.” Or in other words, when pigs fly. Macbeth doesn’t think he’ll be defeated because the woods can’t “come against him” any more than pigs can fly. Or as Clowns Gone Bad puts it, “Oink oink no go flap flap flap.”
MöcShplat is the brainchild of Alain Goulem, Marcel Jeannin, Danielle Desormeaux, Pierre Boudreau, John Sheridan, Deena Aziz, Kent Waters and of course William Shakespeare. The current production, in conjunction with Geordie Theatre, features some of the originals and a few new players. The play is appropriate for all audiences, and is on at Centaur Theatre from February 4th to 13th. Tickets: $14.50 children / $18 adults / $17 students & seniors. 514-845-9810.
A Classic of African-American Drama
The Black Theatre Workshop’s 40th season continues with a classic of African-American drama, Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman. Currently on a school tour, the play will be staged for the public from March 1-5 at Theatre Ste. Catherine.
Dutchman is difficult, hard-hitting material. Baraka has been wielding words like weapons for decades, and is considered to be one of the foremost literary figures of the Black community. Controversy has dogged him from his beginnings right up to his 2001 poem Somebody Blew Up America, a scathing meditation on the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Dutchman takes place in a subway car underground, where a young black man comes face-to-face with white values. The play confronts the audience the way only Baraka can, leaving them “breathless, asking the question how did this happen?”
For more information call 514-932-1104 ext. 226.
MöcShplat
Dutchman
Amiri Baraka portrait
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