Matías Piñeiro and the Shakespeareada

About a month ago, I came across a review from the Locarno Film Festival about a film called Helena & Hermia. Loosely based on the eponymous characters in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it was directed by Argentinean filmmaker Matías Piñeiro, and forms a continuation of his ‘Shakespeareada’ – an ongoing interrogation and recontextualising of stories taken out of Shakespeare’s plays (so far, only his Comedies), and placed in the suburban environments of Buenos Aires.

To date, Piñeiro’s ‘Shakespeareada’ consists of Rosalinda (2011), Viola (2012), The Princess of France (2014), and the just-released Helena & Hermia (2016). In both Viola and The Princess of France, the two of his films more readily available, the structure is essentially similar, albeit in slightly different augmentations: there is an extended sequence of material from the respective Shakespearean source-plays (in order, As You Like It; Twelfth Night; Love’s Labour’s Lost; and A Midsummer Night’s Dream), followed by a series of riffs, loops, fugues, and rhapsodies upon the material – both seen and unseen – by the characters.

Backstage in the forest of Arden: Bell Shakespeare’s As You Like It

As You Like It is a bit of a mad old cornucopic delight. It has everything Shakespeare has to offer – political intrigue, danger, love, mistaken identity, a smattering of philosophy, a few songs, (not to mention a spot of cross-dressing and disguise), and it is full of the kind of whimsy and mad-logic that Shakespeare specialises in. In many ways, it’s not so much concerned with a complex plot, or a plot’s complexities (as, say, in Hamlet or Twelfth Night), but rather the interactions and relationships between characters, the ways in which these interactions explore the play’s themes and issues including (but not limited to) love, identity, and self-expression.

Bell Shakespeare’s current production of As You Like It is a strange old beast. Played out against a backdrop of old canvas dropsheets, with several concealed exits and entrances (as befits the oft-quoted set-piece speech), it is characterized by a peculiar languid energy, a strange “holiday humour” where time slows, love is professed, declared and role-played with varying success, and magic can happen if only they’d let it. Directed by co-artistic director Peter Evans, this Arden is full of ideas, as are all his other productions, but somewhere in the transition from the page to the stage, some of Shakespeare [and Rosalind’s] effervescence is lost, and I don’t think it finds it again, if at all.