IT’S Shakespeare but the Bard might not recognise it. A Winter’s Tale is now a battle between chavs and goths while the BBC has signed Twiggy to appear in a modern Taming of the Shrew.
On Sunday, 10,000 children from 400 schools will take part in an event designed to energise Shakespeare’s works for the MTV generation.
After a series of BBCsponsored workshops, they will perform 30-minute abridged versions of his plays at theatres across Britain to create a record-breaking One Night of Shakespeare.
Fifteen years after the last televised contemporary adaptations, the BBC has rediscovered the Bard. It is encouraging schools to explore contemporary social issues through radical revisions of the texts.
A series of big budget prime-time dramas will then be the centrepiece of BBC One’s autumn schedules. Macbeth is transposed from the bloody Scottish battlefields to the enclosed and heated world of a fictional celebrity chef’s restaurant kitchen. James McAvoy, star of Channel 4’s Shameless, is Joe Macbeth with Keeley Hawes as the psychotic Ella Macbeth. Twiggy, the former model, gets a chance to parade her acting skills in a 21st-century Taming of the Shrew. Shirley Henderson is the vitriolic, aggressive Kate, an opposition MP who is instructed to find herself a husband to make her more electable. Twiggy appears as Kate’s mother, with Rufus Sewell playing Petruchio.
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The school productions are no less imaginative. A Romeo and Juliet with an Afro-Caribbean Romeo and Jewish Juliet is in rehearsals.
Another school is using Twelfth Night to explore the issues of immigration and asylum, while the tragic jealousies of A Winter’s Tale are relocated to the teenage tribes of chavs and goths.
Star names, including Billie Piper, have been recruited for the BBC One dramas, which are expected to draw large ratings. Doctor Who’s assistant plays a TV weathergirl in Much Ado About Nothing.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is set during a weekend in a holiday park, with Imelda Staunton as Polly and Bill Paterson as Theo. Laura Mackie, BBC Head of Drama Series, said: “There have been modern versions of Shakespeare before but these new interpretations remain true to the originals.
“At the same time, they are unashamedly a very personal take by each writer. Our aspiration is that they work on their own terms for a modern audience.”
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BBC One will follow the initial four Shakespeare dramas with more from the canon if viewers respond. Classic adaptations are the autumn theme with a £6 million Bleak House also about to run.
Dickens’s book is being screened EastEnders-style in 30-minute episodes running twice weekly.
Mackie said: “The Dickens novel was very much the soap opera of its day, and we hope to emulate those same cliffhanger emotions in televisual terms.”
The BBC said that the appearance of Dickens and Shakespeare on primetime BBC One was in no way connected to the Government’s review of the licence fee, which will set out new terms for the corporation’s charter in October.
MODERN BARD
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THE TEMPEST Gregory Peck plays the leader of a gang of fugitives who, like Ferdinand in Shakespeare’s play, falls for the offspring of a local leader in the 1949 western Yellow Sky. The play was also used for Forbidden Planet in 1956
ROMEO AND JULIET The Montagues and the Capulets became the Jets and the Sharks for West Side Story in 1961
HENRY IV River Phoenix and Keanu Reeves play Falstaff and Prince Hal as rent boys in My Own Private Idaho in 1991
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KING LEAR Akira Kurosawa combined King Lear and samurai legends to make Ran in 1985
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW provided the story for the Broadway musical and film Kiss Me Kate. In 1999, 10 Things I Hate About You used the story in an American high-school setting