ABSTRACT
Shakespeare’s drama has long functioned as an import/export commodity, and a volume entitled World-wide Shakespeares raises the question of how one might understand the politics of such an exchange within and across geographical and cultural borders. In the case of Elsinore, a one-man production of Hamlet devised and directed by the Québécois actor-director, Robert Lepage, familiar models of subversion, appropriation, hybridization and dialogic interaction seem unable to capture, quite, this show’s peculiar engagement with the canon. It is difficult, for example, to see how Elsinore ‘writes back’ to Shakespeare, nor does Lepage appropriate Hamlet to speak to a national or ideological agenda. The production does not draw on local or intercultural theatre traditions in the manner of a Peter Brook or Ariane Mnouchkine, and one struggles to identify anything about the performance style of Elsinore recognizably French-Canadian, or even Canadian (whatever that might be). A one-man show, realized in its earliest touring life by Lepage himself – a white French-Canadian man speaking the lines, when performed in English, with an assumed British accent – Elsinore does not even incorporate the sort of linguistic, racial and ethnic multivalences so fundamental to the interpretation of other Lepage productions such as Tectonic Plates or A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Hunt 1989: 111-17; Hodgdon 1996: 68-91). And yet Elsinore undoubtedly constitutes a ‘world-wide’ Shakespeare event, not just from an Anglocentric perspective that marks the show’s origin in a nation other than Britain, the home of Shakespeare, but also from a Canadian perspective that notes that the vast majority of the show’s dates (twentythree out of twenty-nine, not including a cancelled Edinburgh engagement) were scheduled for venues outside of Canada. Is home something Shakespeare returns to, or that Lepage departs from? Or is the idea of ‘local’ best represented by a set of relations that exceeds both Britain and Canada?
