Performing Nostalgia: Shifting Shakespeare and the Contemporary Past.

Bennett demonstrates that attempts to stage Shakespeare, no matter how radical, often revive a nostalgic image of a "better" past. As such, productions of Shakespeare become articulations of the conservative order and/or postcolonial agendas. While such studies may be familiar to the new historicist, who regularly attempts to locate the text in a social or political frame, Bennett widens this prevailing literary scope to include performances of Shakespeare, his contemporaries and, fascinatingly, modern offshoot and rewrites of the same.

Bennett begins her book with a long and thoroughly researched discussion of nostalgia and its practice in Shakespearean production, which, she asserts, demonstrates "the desire for a stable present [which] manifests itself through a nostalgia for a certain sort of history" (75). Such nostalgic representations depend upon the conservative "intention to have the audience visualize the past in the present: to see its resemblance to our own world and nourish our psychic desires for the past itself" (93).

From the theoretical to the practical, the subsequent chapters involve the flexibility, variation and individuality of modern performances of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Bennett demonstrates how actors, critics, directors, audiences and even theatre spaces can contribute to an "obsessive valorization of the past" (65), Bennett then explores twelve productions of King Lear, demonstrating how contemporary productions of Shakespeare are often based on the assumption that what we feel and think today is "just like the Elizabethans."

While Bennett undermines such naive assumptions, the real strength of her book is her discussion of modern Shakespeare adaptations, rewrites, prequels and sequels in relation to postcolonialism and canonicity. She dwells with great detail and sympathy on such works as Edward Bond's Lear, Barrie Keefe's King of England and A Mad World My Masters (the former is a rewrite of King Lear involving a black subway driver who divides his assets before returning to Trinidad), Howard Barker's rewrites of King Lear and Women Beware Women, Derek Jarman's Edward II, and Peter Greenaway's film, The Cook, The Thief His Wife and Her Lover (continuously listed as a loose adaption of Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore). These and other plays and films are examined in an attempt to locate "a counter-classical tradition . . . to invigorate the present" (111).

Bennett's readings of these adaptations, while flexible and sensitive, derive from the unexceptional claim that Shakespeare's plays react to social forces and conditions. While Bennett's book is clear that "straight" performances of Shakespeare are by their very nature reflective and conservative, her premise that rewritings of the texts are somehow more revolutionary is less conclusive and persuasive. It is hard to see how such rewritings or, in Bennett's words, "new ways to play old texts" are somehow "radical" (27). Indeed, the term is overused and often without merit. For instance, on the reception of Adrian Mitchell's Lear adaption, King Real and the Hoodlums, Bennett argues that "the range of response is . . . in itself a radical act" (61). I disagree: When was the last time there wasn't a range of responses toward a theatre production? Other "radical acts" (56) include the doubling of Cordelia and the Fool, a doubling that is, in fact, old hat to most first year drama students. Rewritings undertaken by Shakespeare himself and continued nearly without interruption since his death are suddenly, in Bennett's view, instances of canonical "transgression" (78) and "daring (de/re)constructions" (87).

The reader may agree that new performances, rewritings, prequels and sequels of Shakespeare's plays may be a continuance of or a reaction against a previous production, text or culturally accepted image of Shakespeare, but it's hard to see how or why it should be otherwise. Simply put, whereas Bennett sees radicalism in theatrical change, actors and directors see it merely as a necessary part of their craft.

Bennett is most damning when surveying the conservative manifestations of nostalgia, sharply attacking the ideology behind the newly (re)constructed Globe (which, she argues, "marks the discontinuities of history. It gives performance to what we do not know, yet are obliged to invent, so as to anchor ourselves in the turbulent experience of the present" 05) and most positive when surveying socialist potentials for theatre to serve as an agent of cultural intervention. Bennett is unashamedly biased toward those productions which attempt to recode the text for a wider audience.

Bennett demonstrates that attempts to stage Renaissance plays as if they contained contemporary ideology work well with conservative impulses: the longevity of the plays themselves render unthinkable alternative ways of conceiving society. However, she may be overly optimistic in believing that Shakespearean offshoots "ask those different (oppositional) questions" and seek "a different [read anticanonical] target audience" (53). As even the title of her book demonstrates, rewritings of and reflections on Shakespeare still legitimate the figurehead. The notion that such adaptations are somehow "radical" reinforces the relative sacredness and seeming stability afforded to the text of each play, thereby paradoxically relegitimating the very cultural figurehead such parallelist adaptations wish to subvert.

JEFFREY KAHAN Montreal, Canada