Shakespeare adaptations are everywhere, from West Side Story to 10 Things I Hate About You. But they are also nothing new. Adaptations of Shakespeare’s plays have been gracing stages since the seventeenth century. But why? What’s the point of adapting Shakespeare? Why did audiences love these adaptations, and what do they offer that “pure” Shakespeare does not?
These were the central questions behind Tiffany Stern’s project, which staged Nahum Tate’s Restoration adaptation of King Lear in collaboration with Hidden Room Theatre from Austin, Texas. Tate reimagined Lear to give it a happy ending, complete with Cordelia and Edgar falling in love and Lear remaining alive and well at the end. Hidden Room toured the production across the US, and reviewers called it ‘a glorious achievement’ (BroadwayWorld) and ‘impeccably produced and researched’ (Austin Examiner).
For this project, Tiffany was Hidden Room’s dramaturge, a process that led to new research insights. ‘During the Fellowship I was asked to research actor-specific questions I hadn’t thought to consider before’, she says. ‘I also learned a great deal from watching actors turn what I understood in a bookish way into practical production.’ Tiffany is now on the Advisory Board for the AHRC-funded project ‘Performing Restoration Shakespeare’. She is researching a book on ‘documents beyond performance’, looking at the materials that surround plays and performances.
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