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The Robinson Players, for over 80 years now, have been the primary source of theatre and performance art for and by Bates College students. With "King Lear", the Rob Players now expand their role, for the first time broadcasting on-the-air theatre and for the first time openly advocating the cooperation of all members of the Bates community - staff, student, and faculty - in the production.
Each spring semester for the last seven years, the Rob Players have presented a Shakespeare-on-the-Puddle production; an outdoor performance of a Shakespeare (or related) play, usually in the Keigwin Amphitheatre alongside Lake Andrews ("The Puddle"). This year, in addition to Shakespeare-on-the-Puddle, the Rob Players are proud to collaborate with WRBC, Bates College Radio, to present Shakespeare-on-the-Air.
The main influence for this production came several years ago, prodded by the CD re-release of the BBC's 1980s broadcasts of the Rennaissance Shakespeare Company (including Dame Judi Dench, Sir Kenneth Branagh, Sir Derek Jacobi, Emma Thompson, and many other notables). Last year two members of the Rob Players -- Assistant Executive Director Matteo Pangallo ('03) and resident costume designer Erika Lilienthal ('01) discussed the benefits of doing a production on the radio (no sets, costumes, props, lights, and no need for the actors to be off-book). They agreed that the production should be of a script whose scope would normally prevent it from being staged at Bates. In the end, they agreed on "King Lear" because of its value as a work of literature, its challenging nature as a work of drama, and its nearly infinite potential.
Like the BBC broadcasts, the WRBC broadcast includes no inter-scene or intra-scene narration. Even the settings are left undefined. In a few places, the script was tweaked to include speakers' and listeners' names, for clarification purposes; but for the most part, no attempt is made to guide the listening audience apart from the words and sounds of the play. Early in the planning process, Director Matteo Pangallo considered including narration, but in the end he ruled against it. Aesthetically, there is no way any narration could be written that would serve to equal or even introduce Shakespeare's language. Historically, there is no justification for such narration. Shakespeare's plays - along with those of his contemporary playwrights - would have been performed on a nearly blank stage, with very few props and set and almost no period costumes. The audience would be TOLD, through the words of the play, where and when they were. Shakespeare's worlds - both on stage and off-stage in Elizabethan London - were worlds of words. In our world, sated into complacency by our inebriation on visual stimulation, the nearest we can hope to come to such reliance upon the purity of imagination, is the audial world of radio. Even the use of minimalist stage design and stylistic acting technique can only hope to approximate what the Elizabethan theatre looked and felt like. Only radio - with its complete lack of visual form - can begin to bring to us the power Shakespeare's plays had upon his audience.
Shakespeare's plots were almost all borrowed and distilled from earlier sources; his themes were repeated over and over again in his work and the work of others; ninety percent of his characters are stock, static, and unoriginal. These aren't the reasons Shakespeare has become the most popular (and one of the most controversial) writers in the English language. Sales of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" are second only to sales of the Holy Bible, not because of the plays Shakespeare wrote, because of the words he used to write them.
So as you follow the tale of King Lear and his disobedient daughters, the tale of Gloucester and his Machiavellian bastard son, and all those whose lives are intrinsically tied into those tales: turn off your TV, put down that magazine. Sit back, relax your mind, and let your ears paint a picture of a different world, far away in time and place. Sit back...and LISTEN.
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