Guest Blog: Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows” by Gary Kuchar

Slings & Arrows, starring Susan Coyne, Paul Gross, Don McKellar, and Mark McKinney as members of the New Burbage Theatre Festival, was heralded by television critics as one of the best shows ever produced and one of the finest depictions of life in classical theatre. Shakespeare scholars, however, have been ambivalent about the series, at times even hostile.

Still of Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross) holding Oliver’s Skull, Peter Wellington (director), Slings & Arrows, 2013

In Shakespeare and the World of “Slings & Arrows” Gary Kuchar situates the three-season series in its cultural and intellectual contexts. More than a roman à clef about Canada’s Stratford Festival, he shows, it is a privileged window onto major debates within Shakespeare studies and a drama that raises vital questions about the role of the arts in society.

In his guest blog below, Kuchar gives an introduction to his book.

Interested in watching Slings & Arrows? It is available for streaming on CBC Gem.

“The theatre is the last forum where idealism is still an open question:

many audiences all over the world will answer positively from their own

experience that they have seen the face of the invisible through an experience

on the stage that transcended their experience in life.”

                                           Peter Brook, The Empty Space (1968)

Sometimes called the bible of modern theatre, Peter Brook’s 1968 work The Empty Space sought to revitalize contemporary stagecraft by declaring that the way forward was to find a way “back to Shakespeare.” Only through such a return to Shakespeare, Brook contended, could theatre fulfill its promise of becoming “a complete way of life for all its members,” a vocation in the proper sense of the term. For Brook, Shakespeare remained the model for modern theatre because his work possesses both the disenchanting skepticism of Samuel Beckett as well as the alienating shock of Bertolt Brecht, while nevertheless penetrating more deeply into human reality than critique and skepticism permit. Without pursuing such a Shakespearean reach, Brook warned, modern theatre would not be able to offer authentically transformative experiences but would simply remain an interesting pastime, one commodity among others. But to achieve such vision, he wryly insisted, “we must endeavour not to bamboozle ourselves into thinking that the need for the sacred is old-fashioned and that cosmonauts have proved once and for all that angels do not exist.” For the renewal of the theatre necessarily consists in his view in a return to its sources in the sacred.

Properly understanding what Brook meant by such audacious and counterintuitive claims is not easy today, especially given his now unfashionable assumption that not all forms of artistic representation are equally contrived or constructed, that some forms of mimesis do, in fact, get us closer to reality than others, and that Shakespeare takes us further in the direction of human reality than most, perhaps all, others. So while Brook acknowledges that theatre is necessarily about the construction of illusions, he insists that not all illusions are of equal value in helping us gauge what is real or authentic.

In advancing such claims, Brook offers an early but now generally overlooked critique of the anti-mimetic or anti-realist theories of language and theatrical performance emerging out of late 1960s Paris, especially the postmodern theories of Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. As such, Brook anticipates more recent Shakespearean scholarship, such as Richard C. McCoy’s 2013 work, Faith in Shakespeare. Looking back on the corrosive effects anti-mimetic theory has had on performance studies, McCoy notes how such theory has led “to a lugubrious fixation on absence and the presumed failure of dramatic representation,” leading him to wonder how in light of such theory “any show can ever go on.” If there is thus a sense of malaise in the Shakespeare world, it’s partly for the same reason that there is a broader sense of malaise in the humanities and social sciences: postmodern critique has painted many disciplines and practices into a relativistic corner, rendering it very difficult to articulate, let alone justify, any clear sense of shared purpose or collectively conceived excellence.

Still of Oliver Welles (Stephen Ouimette) and Geoffrey Tennant (Paul Gross), Peter Wellington (director), Slings & Arrows, 2013

Of the many remarkable things about the three-season Canadian television series Slings & Arrows (2003–6) is its compelling translation of Brook’s general view of Shakespeare to the small screen. Like Brook, the show presents a view of theatre in which the creative agency at play in the process of artistic production rarely moves in a direct line from producer to produced, or from actor to performance. Instead, the series depicts how the creative process is often far more dialectical, showing how the stories we tell refashion us in return. Based on the reflexive principle that life imitates art, Slings & Arrows aims to communicate to a wide audience why one might take Shakespeare as seriously as Peter Brook or John Hirsch (onetime artistic director of Stratford, Ontario) did. As the show’s co-creator and co-writer Susan Coyne explains: “Every year we take a [Shakespeare] play, and we sift it through our own lives, and our own sensibilities, and our own sense of where the world is at, and we try to reflect it in the story that we tell outside the play. There is an interpenetration of the themes of the play and the themes of the lives of the characters.” To understand what is at stake in this humanistic approach to performing and rewriting Shakespeare is to understand why Slings & Arrows has been critically acclaimed by television critics while remaining controversial amongst scholars sympathetic to the anti-humanist performance theories satirized in the series.

In turn, this bifurcation of response to the series further reveals our broader cultural situation as it discloses some of the intellectual, ethical, and aesthetic deadlocks we have now reached. Consequently, situating Slings & Arrows in its intellectual and cultural contexts necessarily involves reconsidering a number of influential but often poorly understood thinkers, including the Canadian critic Northrop Frye. Among other things, such a pursuit reveals how Frye’s lifelong engagement with The Tempest found expression in John Hirsch’s celebrated 1982 Stratford production of the play. Revealingly, this involves a return to Frye’s often misunderstood view of how culturally and historically specific works of art can communicate across time and space, a problem that, for Hirsch, a survivor of the Holocaust, is quite literally a matter of life and death. When placed in these and related contexts, Slings & Arrows provides an excellent, if oddly surprising, occasion to consider how in asking “why Shakespeare now?” we are simultaneously asking “why theatre now?”, “why storytelling now?”, and, hence, “why art now?”

What is notable about Slings & Arrows, then, is not only that it tells a compelling televisual story, but that it invites a reconsideration of first principles among all those who participate in the Shakespeare world as well as those literary, cultural, and academic worlds adjacent to it. For while the story of Slings & Arrows is deeply rooted in turn-of-the-millennium small-town Ontario, and while it’s hyper-focused on the strangely parochial tribulations of festival theatre, it nevertheless touches on matters that remain urgent for people both inside and outside the theatre, be it in Canada or beyond. What is more, it’s also really rather funny.

Gary Kuchar is professor of English at the University of Victoria.