Staging the Everyday: Actual Activities

A reader of Shakespeare’s plays will quickly realize that gifted and experienced actors are needed to represent the exceptional persons who speak their words and are involved in their exceptional situations and actions. Yet, at times, the words are so simple and what is happening so like the events of everyday life that no skilled performances or sophisticated staging seem to be necessary. In his own times this sense of actuality would have been more apparent than it is today because the language of the dialogue was more familiar and even its most extraordinary qualities could be recognized as a heightened form of everyday speech. Loss of verbal familiarity has far-reaching consequences because it obscures a continuous lifelikeness that the plays once possessed, a sense that everything is actually happening at the very threshold of one’s own daily experience. Actors can compensate us for this loss when their sense-awareness and physical performance embody a play’s action and re-animate its speeches, bringing even the most complicated speeches to palpable and present life. A reader can also resuscitate the plays by an active imagination.