The breaking of so great a thing should make
A greater crack
The new performance of Antony and Cleopatra at Shakespeare’s Globe sets to break new ground as the first bilingual performance of the play in both British Sign Language (BSL) and spoken English.
Blanche McIntyre (director) and Charlotte Arrowsmith (Associate Director) have thought deeply about how the two forms of communication work in the play and what it signifies to the characters and the audience. The directors spent ten days, working with the deaf members of the company, co-translating Shakespeare first into modern English and then into BSL.
BSL can be a very direct language. For example, the sign for juicy people, like myself, is expressed by depicting the width of the person. It uses a smaller amount of sign words, compared to Spoken English. The play combines Italian and Egyptian gestures, with sign theatre. This is perfect for Shakespeare, although it takes a lot of work. Charlotte writes:
Translating with BSL is not as simple as adjusting the tones to a voice, speaking the words aloud, navigating the breath control for certain pauses or emphasis, or focusing on prose versus verse, for example. It’s more hands-on (pardon the pun!). It’s about building up the picture or the animation in our minds, sometimes trying to actively draw it out, focusing on emotions and how to express them visually, and on body language – all to animate the words.
Shakespeare is in many ways, the perfect playwright to ‘translate’ into sign language. This is not just because of his importance to the canon or his cultural capital, but also the depth he brings into characters.
As an audience member, the use of two forms of communication added new depth not least because the two leads had strong presences and a steamy stage chemistry projected through their physical interactions. On a similar note, I would also add that the surtitles used throughout the play, helps identify characters, especially when actors combine different roles!
The Egyptian court communicates with sign language and the Romans communicate with spoken English. Surtitles are displayed to help everyone follow along.
One initial concern I had with this approach was that language was used as a sign of difference between Republican Rome and Ptolemaic Egypt, when in fact there would have been more fluid interchange, especially as Greek would have formed a common language and cultural reference point, at least for the elites.
I soon realized this represented my own position as a hearing person. For many other members of the audience, the spoken English would be a barrier. I was reminded of the social model of disability which says that people are disabled by barriers created by society, not by their difference. These barriers can be physical (access into buildings) or attitudal.
However, I would have to disagree with the reading that ‘the failure of the two cultures to understand each other is one of the causes of the conflict’. My reading of the history is more simplistic, seeing power as the cause of the conflict. Antony and Octavian could never share power and war between them was always inevitable.
Shakespeare’s play is more complex, making the political personal and vice versa. It is the perfect play to reflect on current geo-political concerns, such as tensions between the USA and China or Israel and Iran, primarily because the two cultures in the play share a common understanding.
Yet Shakespeare’s Antony is someone who fails to read the political weather of his own community. In Julius Caesar he offers Caesar the Crown at the Lupercalia and in Antony and Cleopatra he makes peace with Octavian, rather than allying with Gnaeus Pompey. Cleopatra is the more canny politician.
The Egyptian court using sign language however raises an interesting point. The idea of ancient Egypt as a silent culture, whose written language would reveal great mysteries and powerful secrets if only it could be read, was pervasive in the period in which Shakespeare was writing. Images of Harpocrates with his hand to his mouth were read as an imperative to silence. These images actually reflect the written language of Egypt. Hieroglyphs used determinatives at the end of many words to help clarify meaning. In this case, a young person with their hand to the mouth represented childhood.
Towards the end of the play, the difference in language is used in powerful ways.
The most moving part is where Antony comforts Cleopatra as he dies and signs to her urging her to seek protection from Octavius Caesar and survive: ‘Gentle, hear me’. It is the first time they have signed together without spoken English.
In the programme the directors, write about the history of sign language. In 1880, the Milan Conference essentially banned Sign Language. As a result of this act, many Deaf families continued to use sign language in smaller groups, developing ‘home signs’, a private language. Home signs for Cleopatra and Antony were developed for the play adding to the poignancy of this final scene.
When Cleopatra is captured by the Romans, her hands are held by Dolabella and she cannot communicate. She is forced to speak, something that Deaf people recognise as an act of violence, with deep historical roots and precedents. It is a visceral moment, making evident the violence of Roman imperialism and the violence to women, people of colour and the disabled that are still perpetrated today. Her lines are poignant:
Sir, I will eat no meat; I’ll not drink, sir;
If idle talk will once be necessary,
I’ll not sleep neither.
And when Cleopatra dies, Chariman screams aloud in a silent Globe. It is a deeply uncomfortable moment of unmediated emotion.
Shakespeare, and his main source for the play Plutarch, can glorify death.
“Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have
Immortal longings in me: now no more
The juice of Egypt’s grape shall moist this lip:
Yare, yare, good Iras; quick. Methinks I hear
Antony call; I see him rouse himself
To praise my noble act;
In this version of the play, grief and loss come to the foreground, returning the almost godlike characters of the stage, human.
If the play is a tragedy then what we remember is the passion and the luxury of the Egyptian court. I was also intrigued to learn that the directors created a silhouette shape of Anubis to represent death, instead of the standard BSL sign of two forefingers as drooping guns (not that Shakespeare minded anachronisms).
Anubis, and his companion, Wepwawet, the Opener of the Ways, are not just gods of death, but by this period were associated as messenger and intercessionary figures, between gods and mortals.
As such, Anubis, is a powerful symbol and guiding principle of the play, which seeks to cross boundaries and remind us that power is fleeting and only love can conquer death.
Rhakotis 