In “Twelfth Night,” Illyria is not only the land where a shipwrecked Viola comes ashore; it is also a privileged space where social roles can be transgressed and dreams can come true. By the same token, the Illyria of British director Dan Jemmett would have to be France, where he’s made his home since 1999 and, as he told the Paris Voice, has rediscovered Shakespeare and rekindled his passion for theater. Jemmett’s career is rapidly taking off here as well, as two shows demonstrate, starting this month: “Shake,” an adaptation of “Twelfth Night” at the Théâtre de la Ville-Les Abbesses and “Presque Hamlet” at the Théâtre National de Chaillot.
Some of what these productions share is clear from their titles, which hint at a fresh, bold, sometimes radical approach to the Shakespearean canon. In “Shake,” five actors and a ventriloquist’s dummy play 17 roles, a feat made possible by beach huts where cast members don and discard the costumes of their various characters. Likewise, in “Presque Hamlet,” the Bard’s most famous tragedy is telescoped into a wandering meditation for a down-and-out actor, played by Gilles Privat.
As Jemmett explained in an interview at the Théâtre de la Ville, however, experimental readings of Shakespeare once seemed impossible to him. In fact, this 35-year old director said, it was only in Paris that he first felt “unblocked” enough to dress with movement and setting some of the greatest lines in the English language. In England, he said, where Shakespeare’s plays are “so part of the cultural fabric that either you approach them as literature or as big, bourgeois productions at the national theaters,” it never occurred to him “to direct or do anything to touch Shakespeare,” although, he admitted with a laugh, “that seems kind of crazy, now I think about it, because that’s what they’re for.”
That attitude began to change after Jemmett’s adaptation of Alfred Jarry’s “Ubu Roi,” in which most of the cast was played by kitchen utensils, won a Time Out Critics’ Choice Award in 1998 and interest began growing in Paris for a French version (at the Cité Internationale in 1999). At that time, he met Gilles Privat, and they began working informally on scenes from “Hamlet.” To his surprise, Jemmett found that in French he could “get the imagery of Shakespeare without the almost overpowering beauty of the poetry.” That discovery was enough for him to try again, with “Twelfth Night,” an experience that at last brought him “a feeling of relief mixed with pleasure” to be doing the theater he grew up loving.
But while his unexpected titles suggest innovation, it is more precisely a way of looking at theater, in its creation of illusion and disguise, that Jemmett explores with these shows. In “Shake,” the land where Viola comes ashore is the stage: not only do the beach huts stand in for the actors’ dressing rooms, they also reinforce the play’s central theme of mistaken identities. Similarly, in “Presque Hamlet,” the burning question is no longer, “To be or not to be,” but “To play or not to play ‘Hamlet.’”
Even so, “Presque Hamlet” is interesting for another reason: the dilemma of its luckless actor — how to fulfill his ambitions in theater — was a question Jemmett was toying with in London in the mid 1990s. As a member of the experimental company Primitive Science and as a Ph.D. student at the University of London examining themes of the body in performance, he found himself being pulled into a theater of ideas and away from a theater of storytelling and entertainment, a world he knew from his actor-father and which he had explored in his first show, a “Punch and Judy” with the Norwich Puppet Theater. Wondering if he was going to wind up as a lecturer or “a bitter performance artist,” he asked himself what he wanted to do; the answer came to him, as he recounted with excitement: “I want to be with people! I want to have fun and tell stories!”
And so when his companion, the director Irina Brook, wanted to return home to Paris, Jemmett was ready to make a new start on foreign shores. What he has found, he revealed, is a new passion for theater, thanks to the freedom and opportunities he feels are available here and his relationship with Brook and her “no-nonsense” approach to her art. In his Illyria that is France, then, Jemmett is weaving his own dreams of what theater can be.
“I feel more and more ready to accept theater as a celebration of the fact that we disguise ourselves to tell stories and celebrate that transformation,” he reflected. “In theater, you can celebrate the possibilities of our reality: it can still be a place to dream, a place to imagine.”
“Shake,” Feb 7-23, Tue-Sat 8:30pm (Sun Feb 10, 3pm), Théâtre de la Ville-Les Abbesses, 31 rue des Abbesses, 18e, M&Mac251; Abbesses, 15 euros, tel: 01 42 74 22 77
“Presque Hamlet,” Feb 26 to April 7, Tue-Sat 8:30pm, Sun 3pm, Théâtre National de Chaillot, 1 pl du Trocadéro, 16e, M&Mac251; Trocadéro, 9 euros-17 euros, tel: 01 53 65 30 00
