It’s week two, and two high-profile Shakespeare productions have already graced Cambridge’s stages. Plenty more Shakespeare-inspired shows fill the Camdram diary, dominating the term’s agenda. I boldly ask, therefore, whether it is possible to have too much of a good thing?

I know what an English teacher would tell you: Shakespeare changed the face of theatre, and for the last 500 years his figure has dominated the stage, both directly through his own writing but also indirectly through characters whose relationships, fated desires and scheming humour have transcended him, becoming tropes which we draw from every day of our lives. To dismiss Shakespeare would be the ultimate ignorance. A linguist would draw your attention to the glorious mass of words and phrases coined by this genius; many would think it enough to praise the sheer beauty of his poetry.

But you’ve heard these arguments before, and the problem with them lies in the very assumption that all productions of a single Shakespeare play are the same, or indeed remotely similar. Time, place, space – mess around with these and the play can become almost unrecognisable; the effect on the audience can be completely turned on its head.

Take the recent ADC production of Much Ado About Nothing, a wonderfully-crafted show set during a carnival, with the characters wearing bright colours and masks as they whirled and danced through the story. The masks drew attention to the theme of mistaken identity within the play, which was central but perhaps becomes a little buried under others. The colours and festival atmosphere cast a new light onto the plots and deceits which take place, presenting them as playful games rather than evil schemes. The characters are just messing around, making the betrayals not fatal stabs to the heart, but a good-natured jest. In this case, the setting of the play helped the audience to see the characters’ interactions – interactions which have been re-enacted uncountable times on the stage – from a new angle. Similarly, in the Arts Theatre production of Romeo and Juliet, the characters’ smoking lent a naturalistic (and at times comic) edge to action that gave the plot’s tragedy a new intensity. 

When I watched the Globe’s production of King Lear this summer, I was stunned to see the awesome pillars of the Globe covered up by dusty tarpaulins and white sheets, and that the first characters on the stage were not the King and his daughters, but rather a rabble of travellers who banged on the stage doors and piled up their suitcases in all corners of the stage. This opening was unexpected and unorthodox, but the presence of the travellers put a new emphasis on ideas about travel in the play. Travel wearies the King, drives him to madness, to shelter from a raging storm in a decidedly un-regal fashion. Through her focus on travelling in this way, I realised, the director Nancy Meckler managed to generate audience sympathy for a character whose culpability is often disputed. Lear became a victim of malicious, selfish daughters, all because of the framing of the production with these white sheets and suitcases.

To talk about wacky interpretations of Shakespeare plays without mentioning Baz Luhrmann’s production of Romeo and Juliet would be to overlook one of the most ground-breaking Shakespearean reinventions of all time. The film is dominated by the violence of the two gangs of teenagers, whose rivalry carries less an ancestral intensity than a sense of youthful competition. In this way Luhrmann highlights the youth of the two lovers, their naivety and the pointless danger into which they fall just because of their friends’ red-hot tempers. In this production, I think, their tragedy is at its greatest. Luhrmann uses Shakespeare’s own lines – he changes no crucial plot point or relationship – but implanting this drama within the urban heat of modern America allows the audience to see the lovers in a new light.

While these productions all stuck to original Shakespearean language, they are not merely re-runs of the 16th century Globe performances. Each new director brings a new perspective, a new focus, necessarily imposing onto it their own experiences and emotions, so that the play is no longer a ‘Shakespeare’ invention but a collaboration: antiquity colliding with modernity, creating a piece of art that resonates even five hundred years after its first performance