Lend me your ear: The Vanguard’s William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs

It has been often said that Shakespeare, with Titus Andronicus, had a Tarantino phase, but did Tarantino have a Shakespeare phase? This production, presented by Russall S. Beattie and playing for four (k)nights at Newtown’s The Vanguard, sets out to test this hypothesis, and the result is nothing short of outrageously enjoyable, sitting somewhere between parody, homage, and an Elizabethan revenge thriller. Written and directed by Steven Hopley, it does not seek to replicate Tarantino’s film on stage (as with Strictly Ballroom The Musical), but instead renders Tarantino’s screenplay into iambic pentameter, featuring many subtle quotations of Shakespeare’s own words, clever assimilations of Elizabethan blank verse, as well as three Elizabethanised pop songs, sung by Key William, the in-house bard.

The story, as in Tarantino’s film, remain intact, so too do the ‘Dogs,’ styled here as bandit knights, perfect strangers to one another, hired to rob a casket of precious jewels from a coach on its way to the King. When their heist is thwarted, it becomes apparent that one of them must be an officer in disguise. The six knights – Sirs Blue, Orange, Brown, Blonde, Pink, and White – are here a motley collection of swaggering fellows, clad in leather doublet jackets, breeches, and boots, wearing daggers at their belts, with temperaments as roguish as their deeds. Along with Lord Joseph, Pleasant-Fellow Edward, Holdaway and an Officer, Hopley expertly adapts Tarantino’s chamber-ensemble into a sweaty and heady concoction of revenge, best served cold.

Food for thought: Belvoir's The Cake Man

Set against a backdrop of an old tarpauline, a ring of old packing boxes and crates, jerry cans and metal drums are set around the tiny Belvoir Downstairs space. As items are bought on – a cardboard box, an iron, a chair, table cloth, blanket – we see the beginnings of a house emerge. It could be a stage anywhere, a makeshift space made from whatever is at hand, and it seems perfectly suited to the warmth and intimacy inherent in the space. The first scene – a clever and sly depiction of a pre-invasion culture – soon gives way to a heated and politically-charged vision of Christian missionaries in Aboriginal communities, and we are thrust into the middle of The Cake Man’s grist, its political and social backdrop writ large upon its face.

A co-production between Belvoir and Yirra Yaakin Theatre Company, The Cake Man was written by Robert J. Merritt in the 1970s, and was the first full-length play staged by the National Black Theatre in Redfern. In the intervening forty years, we are ashamed to realise perhaps how little has changed, how racism and intolerance is still ingrained in our way of thinking no matter how much we’d like to think to the contrary, and The Cake Man becomes a sly indigenous perspective on white paternalism.

Belvoir's Strange Interlude

The whiteness is total, all encompassing. Like a void, it swallows the vanishing point into its depths so you are convinced something strange is happening in the fabric of reality. Like the backdrop in a photographer’s studio, Robert Cousins’ set for Belvoir’s latest production (a Simon Stone rewriting of Eugene O’Neill’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play) creates a blank page in the open book of Belvoir’s corner. Ingenious in its simplicity, it recalls Peter Brook’s at-the-time groundbreaking A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1970, the foremost example of Brook’s ‘empty space.’ You might’ve seen the pictures – a white cube of a set, with doors and panels set in its walls, swings hanging from the flies, the giant red feather of Titania’s bower, the actors dressed in brightly-coloured costumes, purples, reds, yellows, blues, greens; a circus-like aesthetic, as it’s often been described as – and as the play progressed, you could tell that the audience too, was aware of the intertextuality, the meta-theatrical allusions at play. Much of what Brook wanted to do in his Dream, was to strip away the tradition of realism that theatre had become entrenched in since the 19^th century, and liberate it into a heightened realm of metaphor and symbolism, where the audience was part of the theatre-making process, involved implicitly in completing the circle of theatrical illusion.