The New Shakespeare: Darth Vader Meets Manga

Yesterday, I had lunch with a friend who told me that “Sleep No More” may be coming soon to Toronto, where I live. “Sleep No More” is an amazing staging of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, set in three reclaimed warehouses in New York City. The audience dons white masks and is free to explore the entire stage/set while actors perform the play silently in rooms all over the buildings. It isn’t the only actors who are silent, though: so is the audience. So ghost-like members of the audience drift through the scenes as silent actors perform one of Shakespeare’s most gut-wrenching and bloody plays. It sounds amazing, and I hope it does come here so I can see it. (For more info on the play, here’s a review from The New York Times).

Hearing about this play reminded me of some of the other wonderful new ways Shakespeare is being given a makeover for the 21^st century. One of my favourites is Ian Doescher’s new take on the Stars Wars saga. The first of the Luke Skywalker movies has been reimagined as Star Wars: Verily, A New Hope. In it,  Doescher has rewritten the scripts so that they read like Shakespeare wrote them for the stage. The results are brilliant, and often very funny. Juts like the plays, characters walk on and off set, even if that set is a Death Star. There is very little description, so the dialogue has to do all the work, making this feat of words and imagination to capture the action of battle scenes and encounters with the mysteries of the force.

But by translating the stories into Shakespearean style, the stories and characters get more interesting.Like the plays, the main characters have soliloquies (monologues) addressed solely to the audience. So, you get to hear Dart Vader and Obi Wan’s private thoughts. The speeches often riff off the Bard’s own more famous lines, as in this example where Luke contemplates the helmet of a Stormtrooper he has just killed:

“Alas, poor stormtrooper, I knew ye not,
 yet have I taken both uniform and life
 From thee. What manner of a man wert thou?
 A man of inf'nite jest or cruelty?
 A man with helpmate and with children too?
 A man who hath his Empire serv'd with pride?
 A man, perhaps, who wish'd for perfect peace?
 What'er thou wert, goodman, thy pardon grant
Unto the one who took thy place: e'en me.”

The results are a giggle fest for Star Wars and Shakespeare fans alike ( and even better if you are both). One of the treats for fans of the movies is that the characters act and speak with the full knowledge of what occurred in episodes 1-3 ( the Anakin saga). Thus, unlike the first Luke Skywalker film, Obi Wan speaks of his apprenticeship of Darth Vader with more knowledge than appeared in the films. This gives the characters more depth than they ever enjoyed on screen.

It is a reminder of what makes Shakespeare great: a deep understanding and appreciation of each character’s inner conflicts. Indeed, the literary critics like Harold Bloom have argued that Shakespeare helped create the modern individual, because he gave expression to the thoughts inside our heads. It matters that Hamlet is unable to decide what he should do next – that is a key part of the plot. For Shakespeare, what we think and feel matters as much as what we do. This may be an obvious point in the age of Facebook, but it was not so clear in the 1500s, when your identity had more to do with who you served than what you thought.

In the Shakespearean Star Wars, this approach gives a new depth to otherwise one-dimensional characters. R2D2 gets his own monologues, where he reveals that he is smarter than everyone else around him, and happy to play the fool to get his way. Darth Vader emerges as a real person, too, quite an accomplishment, given how uniformly evil he appeared in the first of his movies. I highly recommend buying or gifting these books for anyone who likes Star Wars, Shakespeare, or both.

But what if you want to get back to the Shakespeare plays, but you find them tough to understand when performed live? Believe it or not, Manga may have the solution. You know Manga: that Japanese style of animation where everyone has enormous eyes. This drawing style has now been enlisted to bring Shakespeare’s plays to the world of graphic novels. I came across them in a bookstore five or six years ago, and now I have ten different plays, all rendered as graphic novels, with Shakespeare’s words as the script for every panel. These books have been a wonderful way to sit down with my kids and read Shakespeare plays together. We can curl up on the couch and read them slowly, starting and stopping as we like to talk about what’s going on. The kids are often delighted to realize that language that sounds high class actually contains a sly dirty joke, or is a lovely bit of poetry. Often these lines fly by when watching a play or movie, but in graphic novel form, you get to savour them.

The books are also quite imaginative in their presentation of the plays. Some are set in the future, where the scenes look like sets from a science fiction movie. In Julius Caesar, the entire civil war in Rome takes place in a modern city whose sky is buzzing with menacing helicopters. Brutus and his fellow assassins ride around on motorcycles. One of the other advantages of presenting the plays as graphic novels is that flashbacks can be illustrated, an approach that is better than watching the plays live, where they get bogged down in plot summaries.

If you are interested in taking a peek at some of the Manga Shakespeare graphic novels, click here.

Shakespeare wrote some of the greatest tales of any age, so it is wonderful that people keep finding ways to make his work come alive, whether it is in silence, cartoon form, or even in a galaxy, far, far away….