Translating the Classics:
Orson Welles on Shakespeare

December 30, 2006

In classical music there is tension between those who want to hear a piece of music as it would have originally sounded.. with softer period instruments. and those who are perfectly content to listen to music with the benefit modern setting and souped-up instruments. One can go even further and transform Bach into a modern tune with percussion and electronic sounds. I remember one guy named Sal that I knew at Carls Jr. tell me with deep seriousness: "A lot of people don't know this, but Bach has bass." From then on I had an image of him driving around in his low-rider truck, behind tinted windows, with Bach's base rocking the vehicle.

It is an underrated question: to what extent should a work from the past be updated? I probably fall onto the conservative side of those who would venture an answer, since I very much enjoy hearing something the way it would have sounded to the first people to hear it. Faced with a choice of a classical recording on period instruments or a modern version of some work adapted for an exciting performance by Yo Yo Ma.. I confess I would choose the period piece version. It is just deeply ingrained in my intellectual frame that every cultural product is produced for a specific audience and for a particular setting.. and all those particulars absorb my interest to no end.

If there was one constant in the career of Orson Welles it was his abiding love for the classics in general and Shakespeare in particular. Othello, Chimes at Midnight, and Macbeth were three of his important films.. and one can add an incomplete Merchant of Venice to that small group. His early stage productions included the famous voodoo Macbeth, performed in Harlem with a black cast, and the electrifying Caesar. If we include his radio dramas the list grows even longer.

This engagement with Shakespeare began early for Welles. It is pulse-raising to read his confidence in the validity of the experience of Shakespeare:

ON STUDYING SHAKESPEARE'S PLAYS: Don't! Read them. Enjoy them. Act them. ...he wrote plays to amuse audiences in the theatre and he never bothered to have them printed... Internally or externally, however taken, the plays of Shakespeare are among the wide world's major joys; in the theatre, in the library, even in the schoolroom. [Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu 178]

That reminds me of Frank O'Hara and his comparison of good poetry to tight pants.. it is something you just like, not something you think about. Taken by itself Welles' program could be interpreted as a return to the past. The unshackling of Shakespeare from the high seriousness of the Shakespeare culture machine is bound to get you a little closer to the Elizabethan theater.

Orson pushes a good deal beyond that. His actual productions tended to be assaults on the audience. Here is Simon Callow's summary of the voodoo Macbeth:

Whatever the original intention, Orson Welles had staged a highly original and exciting event, an integration of light, sound, movement and decor which had an overwhelming sensuous and visceral impact, a barbaric cabaret. [241]

That is not quite the St. Martin of the Fields version of Macbeth. The play is now something quite different.. no longer a return to Elizabethan aesthetics. Callow rightly brings up Wagner's idea of the gesamtkunstwerk, or the total work of art. This is Bach with electronic bass.

I recoil a little bit here.. and although I would not insist on seeing Shakespeare only in a Globe-like setting.. I prefer the play heading in that direction. My reasoning is that Shakespeare inevitably gets narrower as he is made to fit into a frame. Better to listen and get the multiple voices of an untidy text..

But where the sail of my interest receives a new gust of wind is when it comes to the idea of translating a classic such as Shakespeare into another medium. How does one take a play by Shakespeare and make it into a 60 minute radio drama? Or into a movie? The easiest thing is to do nothing.. just to pretend its a theater drama with only voices.. or one that just happens to be filmed. Welles, however, had an intuitive grasp of the way changes in medium demanded real changes in style.

Callow writes about this approach to radio:

[Welles] wanted to make it very clear that there was no question of simply transferring the Mercury's repertory to the radio. 'I think it is time that radio came to realize the fact that no matter how wonderful a play may be for the stage, it cannot be as wonderful for the air.' [372]

Welles thus seems to accept for himself the challenge of translating a classic.. not simply receiving and performing it. For myself it is right here, in the willingness of Welles to take a play or novel and translate it into a new medium, that I find myself most fascinated by him. It reminds me of the reception of the epic tradition by the dramatic poets of Athens.. and their re-casting of those stories into what we know as Greek dramas. The artistic constant of the last century has been a rapid succession of new mediums.. movies to television to YouTube. Someday looking back at this period it may well be evident that these new mediums forced a recasting of our culture's important narratives.. There simply had to be a translation process. Orson Welles may come to be seen as the avatar of this process.. a voice calling out for creative transformation of our cultural past into formats that are contemporary.