ABSTRACT
It is similarly unsurprising that the work of politically oppositional directors such as Michael Bogdanov is so often contained and gentrified in practice, that it sits comfortably at conservative, state-supported institutions such as the RSC, the National Theatre, or Ontario’s Stratford Festival, or that it surfaces in amicable co-operative ventures between Bogdanov’s English Shakespeare Company and the Mirvish family, who own London’s Old Vic and Toronto’s Royal Alexandra theatres, but are best known in Canada for “Honest Ed’s,” Toronto’s most garish discount department store. Produced through actors with the kinds of voice and other training I have outlined here, and through institutional structures that are fully congruent with that training and with the currently dominant multi-national brand of “corporate humanism,” 26 even Bogdanov’s socialist attempts at cultural intervention can result only in variations on what Alan Sinfield has taught us to call “Shakespeare-plus-relevance” (“Introduction” 159)—titillatingly “rad” in content, but comfortably contained and rendered functionally familiar by its modes of production. 27
A controversy broke out in one session about the natural position of the tongue when it is at rest. Does it lie with the tip touching the back of the lower teeth, or does it lie with the tip resting gently against the upper palate, touching the back of the upper teeth? I ascribed the discussion to the fact that the disputants grew up speaking two different languages… and hence may have two different positions of “natural” rest for their tongues. (18)
