Bard Working Class Heroes

Whether you love or don’t love Shakespeare there is no doubt you will see him in a new light next June. Not just because of the innovative idea of a Six Week Shakespeare Festival in Dublin’s Docklands which will take place in a tent under the summer skies, but also because one of the plays may just as well be the final play William Shakespeare never wrote!

How come? Famed French travelling theatre company Footsbarn, in collaboration with writer and translator Andre Markowicz, have put together a show entitled Perchance To Dream which draws upon the nine plays by Shakespeare the company had produced since 1976. Better still, it draws upon at least five of those plays to blend together an inter-textual story that covers the four seasons and what Shakespeare himself called the Seven Ages of Man. The plays involved are, appropriately enough, A Midsummer’s Night Dream, King Lear, Hamlet, Macbeth and Romeo and Juliet. A sort of Shakespeare’s Greatest Hits you could say. In a double bill spread over different evenings, Footbarn are also performing The Tempest in full. And the man behind this truly Shakespearean vision – though Harry Crosby and Aiken Productions deserve their fair share of the credit as well – is founding Footsbarn director John Kilby.
“I’m really excited about spending the summer in Dublin and presenting these plays at that particular location, because any time Footsbarn have visited Ireland before we’ve had a ball,” says John. “Also, Perchance To Dream has been phenomenally successful for us. But what you have to remember is that Footbarn is, essentially, a storytelling company, and we pick on Shakespeare often because he’s cornered the market for great stories that can be told in theatres all over the world, and we even present our shows in ways that we know will be understood by audiences even if they don’t know the language and are unfamiliar with the plays. But with Perchance To Dream, the theme is our own, using Shakespeare’s plays, and it doesn’t evolve from birth to death but, basically, from birth back to birth. And the death of a winter. So in a sense it is like Shakespeare’s 34th play.”
Kilby is clearly delighted that the critical response to the production has been universally excellent. In France a lady from the Ministery of Education who is responsible for the French language said, “This show has to be seen by every school kid in France.” But John is quick to point out that Footsbarn does not aim its shows primarily at kids.
“It’s for adults too,” he says. “We’ve just come back from a three month tour of India, and also played at the Festival of Hong Kong where it was translated into Mandarin. In fact, our translator has put the production forward as a DVD and book as a primer for Shakespeare in Chinese schools. All of which is deeply gratifying to us, to affect any culture at that level. And it does highlight the universality of Shakespeare. Actually, in India we are the most famous theatre company outside of the indigenous troupes.”
Kilby also points out “for the benefit of hotpress readers in particular” that music plays a big part in any production by Footsbarn.
“Music is integral to us because it’s live and ever present during our shows,” he says. “On this tour we have a band you might have heard of, called The Sons of the Desert, and what they play has been composed by a classical musician in Amsterdam, but since the band have joined they’ve worked around his themes and also created their own music. For example, there’s a guy called Ewan Shields, and he plays an electrified mandolin, so the music goes from old English to the present day. And it not only adds another layer to these shows, but it is as I say hugely important to Footsbarn. So I honestly do think a lot of your readers should come along and see what we are trying to do with Shakespeare. I promise they won’t regret it!”

Footsbarn at will perform at the George’s Dock Festival from June 14.