Culture and Kitsch – Vernacularized Shakespeare

Shakespeare a brand name that sells …

Even a vernacularised version of The Tempest

Germany’s smallest theatre festival, the Shakespeare festival Ludwigsstadt, goes into its second season with as much pomp and circumstance as its big brothers all around the world. When a year ago local cultural heavy weight Daniel Leistner issued invitations to a press conference, even one in Hicksville Germany, to present his revolutionary new concept of a vernacularised Shakespeare, newspapers, the major of Ludwigsstadt Timo Erhardt and even a camera crew (Bayerisches Fernsehen) were in attendance to hearken devoutly and celebrate the beginning of a new cultural era. Every year one Shakespearean play is functionalized to help express and preserve the identity of Ludwigsstadt, a small municipality in the Upper Franconian district Kronach. It is edited, cut to fit into a 90 Minute time limit and translated, not only into German, but into a German vernacular that is apparently so peculiar that only the 3,489 true-born inhabitants of Ludwigsstadt are able to understand, participate and appreciate the great changes this new popularisation of Shakespeare’s classics in Germany. This was a year ago and the celebratory mood has yet to wane.

The world-renowned Renaissance playwright and author of 37 plays, 154 sonnets and several narrative poems that are known as the utmost expression of humanity in the English language, is now a naturalized citizen of Upper Franconia. His poetry adopted into the local vernacular, forcing canon classics to become volksnah, accessible and relatable to a 21^st century audience high up in the Bavarian north.

This year, festival director Leistner strikes once again, adapting Shakespeare’s last romantic comedy The Tempest to the Upper Franconian stage threatening to drown the Renaissance masterpiece in buckets of local colour. Between the traditional marksmen’s festival and the parish fair S’Unwaddar, or Das Unwetter in standard high German (the actual German title is Der Sturm) will premiere on September 27^th.

Our Shakespeare belongs to all of us and post-colonialism makes it possible to adapt the works of the grandmaster to everything, and anything really. Remember Aimé Cesaire’s post-colonial rewrite of Shakespeare’s original The Tempest that urged a contemporary audience to reconsider the lasting effects of colonialism. For Cesaire Shakespeare’s authority becomes a means to criticise cultural hegemony, building his play upon a complex hall of mirrors. While rejecting the dominant culture of the coloniser, the voice of the perceived subordinate still needs and partially depends on the authoritative tone behind Shakespeare’s works. Cesaire’s Caliban is the black slave who tries to reassert his ownership of the island as well as the right to speak his language and practice his own customs. He rejects his master, chooses his own name X, an allusion to Malcolm X and the Civil Rights Movement in the USA, to find  his own identity. Unfortunately, Prospero still holds the island, even after everyone has abandoned the island, leaving only Caliban as his only subject.

Now, Leistner seems to apply the concept of the empire writing back, forgetting only the tiny detail that Ludwigsstadt was never colonized or part of the British Empire, nobody used Shakespeare to missionize the Franconian “savages” or educate them in the English language. The question remains as to why Leistner picked an author who has no ties to the region or its cultural heritage? Is it really necessary to use even misuse Shakespeare, the English playwright, to glorify a Franconian dialect?  Paradoxically, the post-modern thinking that enables Leistner to stage The Tempest even in patois, forces the audience into a very uncomfortable position between a rock and a hard place.

Leistner’s concept rejects the notion of theatre as a high culture institution, almost dismissing it as snobbish. For the Franconian cultural guru it’s about remaking the theatrical experience into a cinematic one, back to the roots, back to the pop culture version of Shakespeare between groundlings and sparse technical equipment. Yet, he also depends on the authority of those classics, the authority of Shakespeare’s voice to draw enough attention to his outlandish project. He could have used the works of a dialect poet, but those fabled cannon pieces everyone seems to know without really knowing them, especially if they are actually English plays written 400 years ago in verse, garner much more attention. He not only popularizes Shakespeare but takes that post-modern experiment one step further by vernacularizing it, overlaying and distorting Shakespeare’s story and words with Franconian traditions, which begs the question, why call it Shakespeare, when it’s really Leistner?

With all the media attention the festival gets, one could almost expect with the Royal Shakespeare Company would be in attendance, instead of amateur actors fudging their way through a modified Leistner version of high class entertainment to get Frankonian country bumpkins acquainted with theatre that pretends to be like cinema. It’s about the name Shakespeare rather than the message of the play. Shakespeare is a brand name that sells, even in small town Germany.