Giving Notes (2002)

Michele Siebler

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In its research CASP has found over 80 Canadian adaptations of Hamlet––some direct reworkings, others, like Michele Siebler's Giving Notes, indirect adaptations. The range of adaptive practices relating to Hamlet in Canada is extraordinary––one has to ask why the play seems to be such an idée fixe and why so much creative effort has been expended in adapting it. Certainly, part of the answer lies in the enormous amount of cultural capital invested in Hamlet generally, perhaps Shakespeare's best-known play. As Anthony Davies argues in his Oxford Companion to Shakespeare essay on Hamlet, "The play has held such an important place in the literary canon that the history of writing about Hamlet is practically the history of literary criticism itself, successive interpreters and schools of thought inevitably having to try out their ideas, sooner or later, on this most celebrated and enigmatic of texts" (181). Additionally Hamlet  "is characterized by an unprecedented range of dramatic techniques and styles" (ibid.) and "seems to have been an immediate success, performed in London, the universities, the provinces, on the Continent, and even at sea" (ibid.) as multiple period references to the play make clear. The play's success, then, may well be tied to the extraordinary range of things it accomplishes as theatre, one of which, no doubt, is to invite successive re-interpretations as a way of entering into dialogue with its rich theatrical legacy as well as to capitalize on the extraordinary equity the play retains in the cultural marketplace.

Giving Notes, first performed at The Fringe (Toronto's Theatre Festival) in 2002 (July 5-13), originated as a two minute monologue on BBC television by renowned British comedienne Victoria Wood, expanded by Michele Siebler into a forty minute production. The play "follows Alma, the director of an amateur theatre production of Hamlet. We meet her 'giving notes' from a previous rehearsal and die laughing as she destroys one of theatre's greatest masterpieces" (Fringe Festival Program notes). The play, then, adapts Hamlet in a rather interesting way: not only was it staged as a fringe production based on a short skit, it also stages a staging of an amateur production and does so in a way that "destroys" the original. This meta-theatrical act of diminishing one of the great world masterpieces of literature in a fringe setting convenes to a longstanding tradition in Canadian adaptations of Shakespeare, in which Shakespeare becomes the butt of parody and satire as a function of his greatness.

The tension between the imposing cultural capital accumulated by Shakespeare and the risible attempts to mount a disastrous production by a godawful director makes Giving Notes a useful (recent) examination of the ways in which Shakespearean cultural capital circulates generally. The way that Giving Notes addresses "product placement" (and Alma's shameless attempts to place products in her amateur production) is but one example of how the play takes on the commodification of Shakespeare in a self-satirizing mode that CASP notes can be traced back to nineteenth-century Canadian plays like Charles Ebeneezer Moyse's Shakspere's Skull and Falstaff's Nose: A Fancy in Three Acts (1889). The play, importantly, also puts to centre stage theatrical activities centred on amateur and community activities, far-removed from the elevated contexts of the Canadian Stratford Festival, perhaps the most familiar Shakespearean referent for most Canadians. In so doing, Giving Notes reminds us of the vast range of social and cultural activities that take place in the name of Shakespeare across Canada (and elsewhere).

Even as the play makes light of Alma's self-aggrandizing and bathetic attempts to direct Hamlet, there is a tinge of truth to the way in which Shakespeare is portrayed as an instrument through which the players will be educated. The colonial resonances of the scene of education by a misdirected director are not to be underestimated (especially in a Canadian context). Shakespeare, after all, has been used as a conduit for the transmission of cultural values in a variety of national sites––usually involving the education of settler culture by its colonial masters. That this education often involves misdirection (as in Alma's exhortation "It may be Hamlet but it's got to be fun, fun, fun!") is part of the serious fun that Siebler's adaptation provokes. The Eye review of the piece noted how Alma is "snotty, condescending, shameless, imperial, flirtatious, near-suicidal and utterly self-absorbed" (44). The obvious parallels to be drawn between Alma and Hamlet's histrionics as a trope for English imperial self-identity may push the limits of what is meant to be an amusing extended monologue. But they are there nonetheless.

The play ends with Alma (almost) alone in the theatre after the rehearsal reciting a well-known speech from The Merchant of Venice ("The quality of mercy is not strained"), and then proposing to Martin the stage manager that they go out for a drink "to discuss next season's Macbeth On Ice." Martin flees the theatre without Alma and the movement from the sublime back to the ridiculous is restored even as the play gestures to the extraordinary range of adaptive gestures possible within the Hamletian context.

For the record, CASP notes that a hockey adaptation of Henry V has been done in Canada and that Richard Rose directed a version of Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Stratford Festival theatre in 1998 in which hockey figured. CASP also notes that Siebler has written another adaptation of Hamlet based on Dr. Seuss––Green Eggs and Hamlet. The latter was denied permission for performance by the Seuss estate and features Hamlet's dramatis personae as well-known Seuss characters (Claudius as the Cat in the Hat, Gertrude as the Grinch, Horatio as Horton, and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern as Thing One and Thing Two). Finally, site users are directed to Keir Cutler's Montreal Fringe play Teaching Shakespeare: A Parody, in which similar themes to those of Giving Notes are explored.

Daniel Fischlin

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CASP gratefully acknowledges Michele Siebler's permission to publish this playscript to its website.