Narrated by Simon Russell Beale and animated by a team of world-class puppeteers with live musical accompaniment, this unique production directed by Greg Doran blends comedy, tragedy and Shakespeare’s incredible poetry to bring the famous story of Venus and her obsession with the handsome Adonis thrillingly to life in a rich, captivating theatrical experience.
What first drew you back to Venus and Adonis, and how does this production reframe Shakespeare’s narrative poem for a contemporary audience?
Shakespeare wrote Venus and Adonis in lockdown. The theatres had been closed
because of the plague, and Shakespeare needed to make some money, so he turned his skill to poetry. What is so astonishing about Venus and Adonis is that you can tell this is written by a young man honing his skills as a playwright, writing characters, exploring the psychology of desire and attraction, which makes it very contemporary.
How does the use of puppetry shift the emotional distance or intimacy of the story’s
central relationship between Venus and Adonis?
In a way, the puppets both distance and intensify the emotional impact of the story. It is
highly-charged and at times quite erotic, and perhaps the puppets can do things that we would find challenging if represented by human beings.
In what ways did working with Simon Russell Beale as narrator influence the tone rhythm, and storytelling approach of the piece?
We haven’t actually started rehearsal yet so this is a hard question to answer, but I know
from having worked with Simon before on The Tempest, just how alert he is to Shakespeare’s rhythms and to finding the nuance in the verse, alert to how quickly
Shakespeare turns from comedy to tragedy.
What inspired the blend of Bunraku traditions and Jacobean masque aesthetics in the visual and physical language of the production?
We were on tour in Japan with Macbeth when I first saw the bunraku puppets in Osaka. I loved the simplicity of the idea, in other words: a single narrator on one side of the stage and a single musician on the other, and in between this ravishing set with puppets manipulated in full sight by the puppeteers. The willing suspension of disbelief inspired complicity with the audience- you connected emotionally with those puppet characters. I thought it would be possible to use the same techniques to explore Venus and Adonis.
How do you see this adaptation sitting within your wider body of Shakespeare’s work in terms of experimentation with form and perspective?
This is Shakespeare as a young writer cutting his teeth, developing plot, radically
reinventing the story. In Ovid, the original story Shakespeare used, Venus and Adonis are mutually attracted to each other. What Shakespeare does, which is radically different, is make Venus obsessed with Adonis, who has no interest in her. All he wants to do is go hunting – so the dynamic of the relationship is entirely different.
What does working in this more “miniature” or intimate theatrical scale allow you to
explore that large-scale Shakespeare productions might not?
I guess it’s not the scale of the production that I find fascinating but more the mode of
expression. Puppets are great film actors! A woman came up to me after one performance, saying she hadn’t spotted the moment where we swapped the comedy Venus puppet for the tragedy Venus puppet. I had to tell her there was no difference. There was only one puppet, but she read into the puppet’s expression both humour and grief.