1. Introduction: Methodological experiments
[1.1] Through archival research, I use Druid Theatre Company's early productions of Shakespeare plays—Much Ado About Nothing (1980–81) and As You Like It (1999)—to show how approaches to Shakespeare performance by Irish theater practitioners are caught in a specific bind of adherence to tradition and rejecting it. I call attention to how ideas of canonicity and authenticity shape the ways in which Shakespeare performance is talked about and conceived, the ways in which these ideas act as a form of gatekeeping for practitioners and audiences alike, and how this gatekeeping takes on a significant presence in an Irish postcolonial context. Here I use fandom and antifandom studies to theorize this juxtaposition: the duality of fandom, I argue, offers an opportunity to read these productions as walking a thin line between fannish appreciation of Shakespeare and a need to work with the postcolonial tension inherent in Irish Shakespeare performance. As Jonathan Gray has posited, fans are "frequently more than close readers" and "are also and always-already close readers to some degree, and never escape a deep awareness of the work," yet "anti-fans construct an image of the text—and, what is more, an image they feel is accurate—sufficiently enough that they can react to and against it" (2003, 70–71). What is theater-making, if not close reading, if not constructing an image (or images) of the play-text?
[1.2] Let's talk about Irish Shakespeare performance more generally. Irish Shakespeare performance is a nascent field within the broader subfield of Shakespeare and Ireland studies. The field at large has mainly focused on representations of Ireland in Shakespeare's work (namely Captain Macmorris in Henry V) and on Irish literary responses to such representation (see Bates 2008; Burnett and Wray 1997; Clare and O'Neill 2010; Murphy 1997; O'Neill 2004; Putz 2013; Steinberger 2008; Taylor-Collins and van der Ziel 2018; Taylor-Collins 2022). I call it Irish Shakespeare performance to encompass how Irish theater-makers and creatives participate in the adapting, performing, and appropriating of Shakespeare's work. Many Irish theater-makers primarily perform or have primarily performed Shakespeare on the island of Ireland. Many Irish actors—including Kenneth Branagh, Fiona Shaw, Peter O'Toole, and others before and after them—made their names as Shakespeareans within the context of British Shakespearean theatrical institutions such as the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. This stage traffic extends beyond the formation of the RSC, the NT, or even the formation of the Abbey Theatre in 1904 (note 1).
[1.3] Irish Shakespeare performance is an intriguing case study to explore Shakespeare and antifandom because of the strange bind that is the relationship between Shakespeare and Ireland. That is, many Irish theater-makers see engaging with Shakespeare as an inherently political act, regardless of their political persuasion, their religious background, and so on. This is a viewpoint that I share: the performance and adaptation of Shakespeare is not a neutral act anywhere, much as others would like it not to be so. But in Ireland, there is a specific postcolonial charge to Shakespeare performance. More often than not, there is a constant awareness of adapting his work as an Irish theater-maker, a perceived sense of incompatibility, of mismatching styles, and of lack of specific training. There is a push and pull at work here: on the one hand, Shakespeare is English property, but on the other, Shakespeare can be made Irish property too, as nationalists such as Douglas Hyde, W. B. Yeats, and Ernie O'Malley have done (Murphy 2010, 2011, 2015). It is as if Irish theater and Shakespearean theater do not go together, however many times that has been proven untrue. As such, there is then a tension in Irish Shakespeare performance: the desire to reject tradition and embrace modernity coexists with the desire to prove the theater-maker's ability to perform Shakespeare as (the English) tradition dictates it. Can you blame me, then, that when trying to encapsulate this tension in a title for this essay, all that comes to mind is the subtitle from a U2 song?
[1.4] How are fandom and antifandom studies useful for my purposes here? Valerie M. Fazel and Louise Geddes draw a connection between Shakespeare on stage and Shakespeare in fan cultures: "Just as on the stage, in fanfic, experiment is key to Shakespeare adaptations, balancing the inspirational text with the adapter's desire to recreate it in accordance with their converging interests" (2022, 4). With respect to Shakespeare adaptation studies specifically, Fazel and Geddes also draw our attention to its struggle to appraise what they call "the place of inbetweenness where Shakespeare exists as both a point of reference and departure." This, they argue, results in overly determined critical thinking where Shakespeare's cultural capital is concerned: "The problem lies in the uncritical assumption that the Shakespeare text is a singular object that develops and absorbs new iterations, continually expanding in result" (2022, 7). While I specifically focus on performance, it is my argument that this inbetweenness is crucial to understanding Irish Shakespeare performance and its tension, its postcolonial charge. My conjoining of theater history and archival research with fan studies follows on from Abigail De Kosnik's (2015) conjoining of new media stories and performance studies, as well as linking fan cultures as an empirical element in theater studies scholarship as per Matt Hills. Here, I heed Hills's call to treat fan cultures "as an empirical part of the contemporary theatre world in a new array of theatre studies rather than drawing on pathological stereotypes of media fandom […and] refusing to render theatre fan practices 'invisible' within an anti-high-cultural iteration of fan studies" (2017, 501). I apply Hills's thinking to the broader performance ecosystem of production and reception.
[1.5] Here, I want to situate this article through my own positionality. As a performance scholar and theater historian primarily working on Shakespeare and early modern performance studies, I am a (very welcome!) interloper into fan studies in this special issue. My work on Irish Shakespeare performance thus far has focused on harnessing different methodologies into dialogue with one another—primarily, but not limited to, Irish theater studies and Shakespeare studies (McHugh 2019, 2021, 2022). Heeding Hills's (2017) exhortation to incorporate fan studies and cultures as a crucial element in theater scholarship, this article is a methodological experiment in assessing what fan studies and antifandom studies offer to my thinking in Irish Shakespeares. Harnessing fan studies in this way is also a method of, to borrow Hills's wording, rendering my own practice as an acafan of Irish Shakespeare performance more visible too. Placing fan studies and Irish Shakespeares into dialogue is my method of understanding how the tensions of antifandom, with its more-than-close reading and deep awareness of the text and reactions against said text, coalesce in Irish Shakespeare performance. I use Druid's early Shakespeare work as an example of these tensions coalescing; in the company's fannish reacting against Shakespeare in these productions, as well as its reception drawing a distinction between Druid's approach and conventional Shakespeares, I argue for a reading of its production and reception as antifandom.
[1.6] I use materials in Druid Theatre Company's archive to trace how this tension manifests in how the company envisioned their productions of Much Ado About Nothing and As You Like It. I approach these materials both as theater historian and as acafan, piecing together the materials that are available to me from the 1980s and 1990s as an academic writing in the 2020s. The archive, of course, is not a complete one; whereas a video recording of AYLI survives, there is none for Much Ado. As Rebecca Schneider reminds us, "The archive has long been habitual to Western culture. We understand ourselves relate to the remains we accumulate as indices of vanishment, the tracks we house, mark, and cite, the material traces we acknowledge as remaining" (2011, 97). As both theater researcher and acafan, I have to make do with what remains in the Druid Theatre archives (held at the University of Galway's Special Collections)—primarily photographs, programs, and newspaper clippings—and piece together these histories and narratives.
[1.7] This is not an article about performance analysis, however. But we know that, as Barry Houlihan rightly asserts, "the historiography of Irish theatre in modern times can greatly benefit from a deeper and engaged relationship with the archive and records of the time" (2021, 4). The same is true of Shakespeare performance, of course. "How," Barbara Hodgdon asks, "do these selected remains…take on meanings? What stories does each tell?" (2015, 110). I join Houlihan and Hodgdon together here to show the parallels in both fields about the use of archival material in constructing theater histories and historiographies. By exploring a selection of archival material relating to the staging (and selling) of Much Ado and AYLI, I show how this tension surfaces in these productions, as well as investigate how the production and reception of both exemplify typical cultural attitudes toward Shakespeare and the performance of his work in Ireland, specifically issues surrounding authority, fidelity to the Shakespearean text, and the issue of relevance to Irish audiences. I explore the significance of Druid's positioning their work in relation to so-called Shakespearean authorities, whether it's the RSC in the case of Much Ado or the hiring of someone experienced in the case of AYLI. I also examine how evaluations of the productions—both by members of their respective creative teams and by theater reviewers—emphasize characteristic attitudes toward fidelity, purism, relevance, and originality that draw parallels with their later work.
[1.8] What remains consistent is that there is a distinction made between a Druid, or an Irish, approach to Shakespeare and a more conventional, traditional approach to performing such work. This gives rise to "the place of inbetweenness" as per Fazel and Geddes (2022, 7). This attention to fidelity proves fruitful for a fan studies approach to Irish Shakespeare performance. Indeed, as Louise Geddes has observed in her theorization of the relationship between the celebrity cache of Shakespeare's plays and what she calls embodied fidelity, "some performative conceits or casting strategies are so strongly embedded within the cultural understanding of Shakespeare that they are conflated with the text itself, setting up expectations of fidelity to a calcified representation of a role, scene, or even an entire production's aesthetic" (2023, 240). I am also guided by Kavita Mudan Finn and Jessica McCall's description of fan fiction as paradoxical, "[existing] in the limen between genre and myth and [providing] unique opportunities for rewritings by the young, the amateur, and the academic alike" (2016, 28). Remember also the paradox inherent in Gray's description of antifans who "never escape a deep awareness of the work" (2003, 70). At first glance, the complexity of Druid's approach is a demonstration of Patrick Lonergan's assertion that "Irish theatre has not yet fully come to terms with Shakespeare" (2010, 345). But, to ask a rhetorical question, what does it actually mean to fully come to terms with Shakespeare in an Irish context? Is it ever truly possible to fully come to terms, or does such a coming to terms with Shakespeare contradict the political project of Irish Shakespeares? Can we ever really wish that tension inherent within Irish Shakespeare performance away? Fan studies (and specifically antifandom as a concept) provides a scaffolding for theorizing this tension, these contradictions and nuances, in Druid's early Shakespeare work and in Irish Shakespeares more generally. This scaffolding lets its paradoxes stand freely.
2. Druid and "Shakespeare-plus-relevance"
[2.1] For its fortieth anniversary in 2015, Druid Theatre Company produced and toured a new adaptation of a selection of Shakespeare's history plays (Richard II, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, and Henry V) by the Irish playwright Mark O'Rowe. As this was announced, the company's artistic director, Garry Hynes, was quoted as saying "this is a great story of families and wars and the making of nations…The question we are asking is how, in the context of the historical relationship between Ireland and England, do we as Irish artists produce these plays today?" (Druid Theatre Company 2013). DruidShakespeare was a critical and commercial success, and a production of Richard III in 2018 bore the DruidShakespeare name as a follow-up (note 2).
[2.2] Shakespeare makes up a relatively small part of Druid's history after its nearly fifty years as a company (note 3). In 1981 and 1982, the company produced a version of Much Ado About Nothing that relocated Messina to an Irish garrison town that strongly resembled Galway after the Crimean War and recast its characters as members of the Anglo-Irish gentry and of the Connaught Rangers. This premiered as Druid's 1981 Christmas production at what was then known as Druid Lane Theatre before becoming the opening production at Sligo's Hawk's Well Theatre in January 1982. In 1999, more than twenty years after the company was established, former artistic director Maelíosa Stafford directed a production of As You Like It at Druid Lane, bizarrely billed by the company as "Shakespeare meets Mad Max" (Druid Theatre T2/258). This production utilized a small ensemble of eight actors, including Mark O'Halloran, Helen Norton, and David Wilmot, and applied cross-gender casting, puppetry, and live music performed by Brendan O'Regan.
[2.3] Several years separate Much Ado, AYLI, and DruidShakespeare. These productions took place at three different stages of Druid's history: the first premiering at its fledgling stage, the second performed at a considerably more developed stage, and the third taking place as the company continued to consolidate its position as one of the heavyweights of modern Irish theater. Certainly the company has not engaged with Shakespeare and early modern drama on a comparative level to that of modern and contemporary Irish playwrights such as J. M. Synge, Martin McDonagh, and Tom Murphy—those whose work they have also approached through the medium of marathon theater in DruidSynge, The Leenane Trilogy, and DruidMurphy, respectively. Despite this infrequency, there appear to be clear similarities between these three Shakespearean productions, and thus a consistency in approaching Shakespeare's work. They all employ a conceptual-driven focus, and we could interpret this as a willingness to approach his plays through a process of innovation, renewal, and experimentation. On a more critical note, we could also interpret this as an application of "Shakespeare-plus-relevance," as defined by Alan Sinfield: "the combination of traditional authority and urgent contemporaneity" (1994, 159). Sinfield may have been writing in the context of the RSC's early work, especially Peter Hall and John Barton's The Wars of the Roses and Peter Brook's King Lear, but his concepts are applicable here. However, like Sinfield, I do not apply this uncritically: as Ambereen Dadabhoy and Nedda Mehdizadeh have ascertained in the context of antiracist strategies for teaching Shakespeare, "relevance assumes that students can understand Shakespeare through his universality, making Shakespeare the author of their experiences" (2023, 65). In comparison to the notion of salience, which "centers students' orientation and affective connection toward what strikes them as vital in the work based on what 'leaps' off the page," an emphasis on Shakespeare's relevance "requires students to meet the text where it is as a fixed expression of human experience" (Dadabhoy and Mehdizadeh 2023, 12). This is just as applicable in a theatrical context, but at the risk of tying this article in knots, I cannot know for certain how this may have manifested in these two productions. Such are the limits of the archive and the limits of what remains, but like Rebecca Schneider following Peggy Phelan's Unmarked, I am encouraged to "think of a performance as a medium in which disappearance negotiates, perhaps becomes, materiality. That is, disappearance is passed through. As is materiality" (2011, 105).
[2.4] It is here that I introduce another framework, albeit comparative in nature, for looking at Shakespeare performance and its reception in an Irish context. Writing in Theatre Audiences, Susan Bennett suggests that "theater critics from the major newspapers may no longer wield immense power—but they still act as representatives of mainstream cultural ideology and their shared assumptions of what constitutes theater reflect their status" (1997, 93). In a British context, where Shakespeare has enjoyed an omnipresence in the theatrical repertoire, Paul Prescott echoes Bennett, yet also factors in the influence of that theatrical presence in theater reviewing. "British Shakespearean theater reviewing—no less than the performance it chronicles—has its own traditions, habits, lineages and anxieties," Prescott writes. "It is insistently intertextual and constantly recycles past writing and past experiences ('Those who saw it will never forget') in an effort to resurrect the fallen, make visible the vanished, and endow the present with shape and meaning" (2013, 4). It is a history and genealogy of British theater writing that is preoccupied with its own sense of history and genealogy. To apply Marvin Carlson's (2001) theory of ghosting, the long, nonlinear history of Shakespeare performance in Britain constantly ghosts the writing of British theater critics, practitioners, and audiences alike. Irish Shakespeares, and the reviewing of them, also have their own traditions, habits, lineages, and anxieties. After all, any given Shakespeare performance, as W. B. Worthen suggests, "generates intense and highly informed debate about the relationship between texts and theatrical production, a debate that centers on issues of legitimacy, power, tradition, and cultural hegemony" (1997, 13). Irish Shakespeares are no exception, and in their own way, they are colored by the dictates of theatrical lineages. In the context of the Abbey Theatre's Shakespearean output, Patrick Lonergan argues that there is "the existence of a belief that it is only possible to stage Shakespeare in Ireland by adopting an iconoclastic attitude toward his works" (2013, 236). But what may present itself as a self-conscious iconoclasm is actually part of the postcolonial tension inherent in Irish Shakespeare performance.
[2.5] I have argued elsewhere that this postcolonial tension is evident in the production of DruidShakespeare, particularly in its pitching specifically for Irish audiences (McHugh 2022). It is my contention, too, that this tension surfaces in Druid's attitude toward Shakespeare's work across the company's forty-plus years of work, through a deployment of Shakespeare-plus-relevance. Shakespeare at Druid is a consistently contradictory beast, but as is already evident, the same can be said of Irish Shakespeare performance more generally.
3. "An authentic voice of their own": Much Ado About Nothing 1981–1982
[3.1] 1981 saw the sixth year of Druid's activity. Shelley Troupe describes how a year previously, the company had won an Edinburgh Fringe Award for Island Protected by a Bridge of Glass, "an original play that explored Ireland's relationship with England during the reign of Elizabeth I," and had performed works by Bertolt Brecht, Georg Buchner, Tennessee Williams, and Bernard Farrell, as well as those of Synge, M. J. Molloy, and Dion Boucicault (Troupe 2010, 461; Druid Theatre T2/70). This diverse menu of productions perhaps reflects what Tanya Dean (2013) highlights as their ambition and canniness as a theater company, sentiments echoed in Troupe's (2010) survey of the company's first ten years. However, this diversity of productions may have also extended to the point where the company could be accused of, as Paddy Woodworth's feature in the Sunday Tribune in September 1981 does, of giving "no clear indication of an underlying policy…Such an eclectic program suggests that the company have yet to find an authentic voice of their own" (Druid Theatre T2/70). Woodworth claims Hynes "concedes this to a point," yet goes on to quote her, stating, "We do have a coherent artistic ideology. We are concerned with how the story is told. You don't just give the audience a content, you have to constantly change the shape in which it is packaged. We try to give an original interpretation to every text" (Druid Theatre T2/70). Generally, members of a theater company are assumed to be unified by collective goals and aims; in Bruce McConachie's words, theatrical production is "driven mainly by ideas: playwrights, theorists, directors, and others with new concepts and commitments create a theater that fits their aesthetic ideals" (2007, 286). It is thus against this backdrop that Much Ado About Nothing, Druid's Christmas production, comes into play. Produced at a time when the company was accused of not exhibiting a cohesive (or visible) artistic ideology, the production of Much Ado is nevertheless characteristic of the company's attitude toward performing Shakespeare, and this applies too to its reception. To return to Hynes's earlier statement, "how the story is told" remains an important issue: it is at once an attentiveness to the text at hand but also an awareness of how to scaffold the performance appropriately for its audiences. Holding these two disparate elements together—if we see them as reference point and departure—is this "place of inbetweenness" that Fazel and Geddes write of (2022, 7).
[3.2] The program supplied for Much Ado informs us about the production's circumstantial influences. A note written on the first page states, "This porgramme [sic] is published by Druid Performing Arts Ltd. All material is copyright. Articles credited RSC are copyright of the Royal Shakespeare Company and are reproduced with their kind permission from the 1970 programme for the Stratford production" (Druid Theatre T2/75). The article reproduced is a series of quotes from, among others, critics such as Proust, Marvell, Coleridge, Voltaire, and the Shakespeare scholar A. L. Rowse on the themes of love, marriage, and desire, filed under the title of "Adam and Eve" (Druid Theatre T2/75). Whereas the date provided for the RSC production is an error (note 4), the replication of this material in the program demonstrates how the RSC functions as a contemporary benchmark for Druid's Shakespearean practice, as well as the use of their material conferring a sense of authority on the proceedings. As Abigail Rokison-Woodall argues, institutions such as the RSC "have been extremely influential in the establishment of principles of Shakespearean verse-speaking on the modern British stage" (2009, 1)—and naturally, this influence is felt beyond British shores. Interestingly, a Connacht Tribune interview with Keith Casburn (who played Leonato in the Druid production) claims he believes that "it would be good for his career to get in to a large company like the Royal Shakespeare, where he could develop his style of work with a company of such high repute" (Druid Theatre T2/70[123]). In light of this evidence, it seems that in their early years, Druid was very aware of the RSC's reputation as an institution and benchmark in Shakespeare performance.
[3.3] Comments made by Hynes in the press emphasize Shakespeare-plus-relevance in terms of selling the production to Irish theatergoers. In early January 1982, after Much Ado reopened at Druid Lane, Kevin Myers quotes her in his An Irishman's Diary column in The Irish Times as saying, "There are no textual changes…but we've changed the titles, and so on, to Lord Lieutenant or whatever. There are lots of parallels with Ireland in the 1850s and in the new setting it has more reverberations for Irish people" (Druid Theatre T2/71). A month earlier, an Evening Press feature on the production had Hynes making similar assertions. "We were all agreed that, if we did a Shakespeare," she told Graham Sennett. "We wouldn't do it in an Elizabethan setting and Much Ado provided us with an opportunity to perform it in the context of a parallel society which would mean something to our audiences. The production is being done in Ireland and we felt it should have an Irish setting" (Druid Theatre T2/70). The production "meaning something to [their] audiences" once again rears up relevance as an issue, which is echoed in her questions decades later about performing DruidShakespeare. It also distinctly locates this performance practice in an Irish theatrical context: this is for Irish audiences. To appropriate the words of Gray (2003), this is a recreating of the text for performance, for a very specific audience—or, as I will demonstrate, very specific kinds of Irish audiences—to react to. Once again, this postcolonial tension comes to the surface. Looking at Shakespeare through an Irish prism is emblematic of a belief that the production will only mean something if it is steeped in local and national culture, as if Shakespeare were not naturally part of the repertoire. This is not to say that any given theatrical repertoire is incomplete without the presence of Shakespeare. But this Much Ado is a distinct Irish reacting against a traditionalist Shakespeare, an Elizabethan Shakespeare, whatever that may mean. This is a form of antifandom at work.
[3.4] Unsurprisingly, if we look at some of the reviews of Much Ado in late 1981 and early 1982, they also estrange an idea of traditionalist Shakespeare performance far from what could safely be described as twentieth-century Irish performance, or even twentieth-century performance in general. An anonymous arts feature in the Donegal Democrat on the opening of the Hawk's Well Theatre praises the production but also notes that it "did have some hindrances to absolute enjoyment, the main one being William Shakespeare's lyrical prose which is too rich for 20th century man to follow with ease" (Druid Theatre T2/71). Given the tendency by much of contemporary Shakespeare theatre reviewing to reserve special criticism for the concept rather than the Shakespearean text (the sacred texts!), it is striking to see local Galway reviewers envision the text itself as a hurdle for full appreciation of the theatrical event. Consider also Jim Lydon's Galwegian Gleamings column in the Western People, which claims that "the transferring of the location of the play from its original setting to a provincial garrison town in Ireland, helped to a high degree in putting the Galwegian audiences 'into the picture,' so to speak, and disposed of any little 'heaviness' which the real Shakespearian wordings and settings might have had on the comedy element of the production" (Druid Theatre T2/71). Kathleen O'Meara of the Connacht Tribune goes as far to propose that "the production is catering for the Galway Christmas audience, and not for the purists, who would be possibly better employed saving their criticisms for Beckett and the like" (Druid Theatre T2/70). Lydon and O'Meara's comments are revealing in what they imply about audiences at these early Druid shows. Writing in 2024, Druid's work attracts sellout audiences at home and abroad; the company has grown into one of the foremost theater companies working on the island of Ireland, as well as one of the most renowned interpreters of Irish theater worldwide. Garry Hynes herself became the first woman director to win a best director Tony for The Beauty Queen of Leenane in 1998. But in the early 1980s, Druid's audiences were primarily local (except for touring to other Irish towns—a reminder that Much Ado performed a few dates in Sligo). These excerpts implicitly claim that that there is a difference between Druid's Shakespeare, making Shakespeare accessible for Irish audiences, and so-called real and authentic Shakespeare performance, with its heaviness (clearly signifying difficult) strictly for the purists. The implication here is that Druid's particularly Irish Shakespeare is itself distinct from real Shakespeare.
4. "Shakespeare meets Mad Max": As You Like It (1999)
[4.1] I move forward in time to show how these attitudes toward Druid's Irish Shakespeares reverberate almost twenty years later. Druid at the time of AYLI finds the company at a considerably more developed stage in their career. Later in 1982, the company had returned to The Playboy of the Western World; Troupe (2010, 463) highlights this production as one that "heralded many firsts for the company," and Patrick Lonergan (2009, 103) contends that Hynes's "reputation is founded on her productions of The Playboy of the Western World." A few years later, Hynes had left the company only to return in the mid-1990s to eventual Tony Award–winning success. Druid had undertaken several tours to the United Kingdom, Australia, and the United States over the years, bringing the likes of Conversations on a Homecoming, At the Black Pig's Dyke, Bailegangaire, and The Leenane Trilogy to audiences all over the world, thus building an international profile and reputation. By this time, this profile was one that firmly established Druid as a regenerator of the Irish theatrical canon (such as Synge) and a generator of a new kind of traditional Irish play (such as Tom Murphy, Martin McDonagh, and Vincent Woods). Shakespeare, one could say, could be seen to fall outside their remit.
[4.2] AYLI premiered at Druid Lane in close proximity to the premiere of McDonagh's The Lonesome West on Broadway; the former production's director, Maelíosa Stafford, would play a leading role in the latter (Druid Theatre T2/258). AYLI's marketing campaign arguably capitalizes on McDonagh's notoriety and popularity—as Lonergan argues, "the popularity of [McDonagh's] works arises partially because audiences share a similarly broad range of cultural interests and are conversant with the wide range of forms from which he quotes" (2009, 106–7), which includes the work of Quentin Tarantino, John Woo, Martin Scorsese, the Pogues, Jorge Luis Borges, and even the Australian soap Neighbours (1985–). In this context, it is no wonder that AYLI is given the incongruous tagline of "Shakespeare meets Mad Max," drawing parallels between this production of a Shakespeare comedy with the popular Australian dystopian action movie series—the first film in the series being particularly notorious for its violence (Falconer 1997, 257). (Frankly, if I wanted to compare Shakespeare to Mad Max, my first thought would be Titus Andronicus and the gloriously over-the-top black comedic bloodbath at its conclusion. I am throwing a bone to any theater-maker reading this and looking for inspiration.) However, just like Mad Max, AYLI is essentially a road movie in theatrical form as Rosalind, Celia, Touchstone, Orlando, and their friends journey out into the unknown (although with less bloody and traumatic consequences). Watching a grainy recording of the production at Galway's Special Collections, I try to mentally make that connection: Duke Frederick's court is wintery, dark, bare, and austere, as it eventually gives way to the bright green forestry of Arden (Druid Theatre T2). But could an audience member watch this production independently of the Shakespeare meets Mad Max comparison and make that connection to the hot, barren wasteland of George Miller's films, other than the fact that both depict somewhat dystopian worlds? It is difficult to tell. But this use of popular culture to sell the production is telling and was arguably an attempt to make the production relevant to potential audience members' interests.
[4.3] In a similar vein, prior to its first performance at Druid Lane, AYLI was billed in the City Tribune and in the Sentinel as "feisty," "kickass," and "Shakespeare with a difference" (Druid Theatre T2/509). Arguably, this is another attempt to market Shakespeare for specific Irish audiences—perhaps a younger demographic. Indeed, it is significant that Judith Ryan, the young star of the show, takes center stage in its publicity visuals: her face essentially was the poster. On the whole, AYLI's publicity campaign is arguably a demonstration of the Shakespeare-plus-relevance approach: conjoining a centuries-old playwright with elements of popular culture and so-called attitude is certainly an attempt to sell the play as something relevant, something that means something to Irish audience members.
[4.4] As with Much Ado, there is evidence that the Druid creative team, as well as the press, were also preoccupied with the production's fidelity as well as its contemporaneity. Stafford had codirected Much Ado for Bickerstaffe Theatre Company the previous year, yet it is striking that an interview with Judy Murphy for the Examiner highlights Jon Tarlton's role as associate director. "John [sic], an experienced Shakespeare director, last worked with Druid 10 years ago," Murphy writes. "This is the first time the two men have directed together and Maeliosa [sic] is happy to have someone of John's experience in this project" (Druid Theatre T2/509). Stafford is then quoted as saying, "John has directed 20 Shakespeare plays. I've done two. He's good. He'll encourage certain things" (Druid Theatre T2/509). Additionally, Tarlton is the author of the production's program note, in which he outlines how the creative team had "taken some liberties with the text, cutting some three hundred lines or so…But, essentially we have remained faithful to the text and followed the same basic journey from the oppressive court of Duke Frederick to the Forest of Arden" (Druid Theatre T2/258). Tarlton, the designated experienced Shakespeare director, is crowned with a degree of authority here, which is harnessed to give the production the heft of legitimacy. Once again, inbetweenness is at work: a distinction is made between fidelity, represented by Tarlton, and contemporaneity, represented by Stafford. Fidelity and contemporaneity need not necessarily be opposed to one another; otherwise, we could call any kind of adaptation or appropriation or reinterpretation a form of antifandom. But in this context, they are primed as a contradictory relationship to each other. Because of the presumption of contradiction, this is a kind of antifandom at work.
[4.5] Assorted reviews of the production exhibit striking attitudes toward the performance of Shakespeare, in terms of fidelity to the text, the use of spectacle, and what can confer a degree of legitimacy on the proceedings. Bernadette Fallon, writing for the Irish Times, describes "the opening scenes set among clanging metal girders, flashing strobe-like flares, copious amounts of dry ice and an other-worldly atmosphere of frenetic, chaotic activity. The question is, why? The set serves only to draw attention to the weaknesses of several performances; overall the cast does not carry off the 'in your face' style" (Druid Theatre T2/509). She concedes, however, that "the production is essentially faithful to the text, occasionally modernising language and cutting lines" (Druid Theatre T2/509). But Fallon's questioning of the production aesthetic—the big question, why?—was more typical of contemporary Shakespearean theatre reviewing in terms of singling out the concept for criticism: she was reviewing for a national, rather than a local, newspaper. Compare this to local reviewer David Burke, reviewing AYLI for the Tuam Herald, who disagreed with Fallon's assessment, claiming that "you don't go to a play like this for the plot. You go for imaginative staging, magical effects, verbal pyrotechnics and first class performances" (Druid Theatre T2/509). Burke went on to assert that "you don't have to be a specialist in English literature to appreciate the language, but it helps to put yourself into an Elizabethan frame of mind, and remember that words like humourous mean 'moody' rather than 'funny'" (Druid Theatre T2/509). Here, Burke infers that if one is not already familiar with Shakespeare or has not studied his work in an academic context, they might not be able to keep up with the proceedings. The common thread, however, remains fidelity. Regardless of their diverging opinions on AYLI, as well as of both local and national contexts, both reviewers return to adherence to the text as a foundation for the production's legitimacy.
[4.6] Evaluating Druid's AYLI from the perspective of both practitioner and critic reflects Worthen's argument that "'Shakespeare' stands at the center of two articulate and contentious traditions—of reading and the criticism of texts; of performance and the staging of scripts—Shakespearean theatre affords a powerful way to bring questions of authority and performance into view" (1997, 2–3). Bringing on board an experienced Shakespeare director and stressing a faithful performance are perhaps par for the course in terms of legitimizing the Shakespearean activity of a theatre company that is not well known for such activity. But does fidelity to the text—what text, if even—and the involvement of Shakespeare specialists necessarily always confer a sense of traditionally authentic Shakespeare? The value of antifandom thinking here, and in a theatrical context more broadly, enables critical attention to how fidelity and contemporaneity are placed against each other, whether seemingly incompatible or not.
5. Conclusion
[5.1] Exploring the production and reception of Druid's previous Shakespearean output highlights the inherent tension in Irish Shakespeare performance, a tension characterized by its relationship to legitimacy, authority, and relevance. But as well as revealing the tensions that are inherent in and characteristic of Irish Shakespeares, an understanding of processes of Shakespearean adaptation can be understood differently when analyzed in relation to fan studies and theater archive research. Conjoining fan studies and antifandom with early modern performance studies (in this case) gives us capricious opportunities to appreciate elements of production and reception that may appear somewhat paradoxical, contradictory, or incompatible. Indeed, this methodological experiment reaffirms for me the centrality of contradiction and paradoxical thinking to my own theorization of Irish Shakespeares: a constant movement between fidelity and iconoclasm, fandom and antifandom, authenticity and invention. It also affirms fan studies as a complementary bedfellow for theater and performance studies, as well as the urgency for a more careful understanding of the contradictions in production and reception in the latter. Thinking about antifandom is never a straightforward enterprise, depending on the demographic and the cultural context. It can be capricious enough, I believe, that it coexists in tandem with how we can express our fandom.
6. Acknowledgments
[6.1] This article has been long in the making (nearly ten years, since my early PhD days!), and I would like to acknowledge the following individuals for their support for this piece, great feedback, and critical soundboarding: Mel Stanfill, Kavita Mudan Finn, Johnathan Pope, the anonymous reviewers, Mark Burnett, Taarini Mookherjee, Edel Lamb, Nora Williams, Shelley Troupe, John Harrington, and Patrick Lonergan.