蜜芽传媒

The Benedict Cumberbatch Hamlet opens, our cousins told us, with To be or not to be. We all groaned. Not, I hope, because we鈥檙e cultural snobs. But my memory was still raw from an abridged Henry the Fifth, opening with a five minute football chant before going straight into Once more into the breach, and then the longest fifty inaudible minutes of so-called Shakespeare of my life.

I鈥檓 passionate about popularising what I love. Teenage girls following their telly idol into theatre. Opera in jeans. Cathedrals full of the homeless. How it should be.

I once suggested to a Shakespearean company I worked with, a performance on the prom of a seaside town. 鈥淥h no!鈥� said the director. 鈥淎ll the wrong kind of audience: ice-creams and fish and chips.鈥� I was deeply shocked.

I recently met someone from Hong Kong studying English literature, who鈥檇 never encountered Shakespeare. 鈥淪urely he just wrote for peasants and wasn鈥檛 very good?鈥� he said. True, he pleased apprentices as well as courtiers: one of his many marks of genius.

Being brutally honest though, he doesn鈥檛 still appeal to everyone today. Or rather, his image doesn鈥檛. Audiences, of any background, hearing the real Shakespeare always love him. But too often we stultify his reputation with reverence. We were emerging from a romping Merry Wives. 鈥淭hat was great,鈥� said a tourist behind us. 鈥淣ot like Shakespeare at all.鈥�

I was running a course on reading the Bible out loud. The hardest job was to break down the burden of veneration. I asked everyone to bring a passage of Scripture with another example of the same literary genre from elsewhere. So we had an extract from a Gospel, with an eyewitness account from a tabloid; Saint Paul, with a letter from a present day prisoner; the Songs of Songs, and a contemporary erotic poem. Each read the modern passage far better than the Biblical... with the sole exception of the youngest, a twelve year old who hadn鈥檛 yet learnt to obstruct Scripture with an awed pomposity.

Finally, on Bible Day, we recited a dozen biblical passages without announcing what they were. The congregation didn鈥檛 recognise them. One reading, they thought, was from a surrealist play: another, a press report of war-zone atrocities. All sounded far too fresh and arresting to be from long ago. They loved it.

If the Christian message is true, it must be as astonishing and accessible for each generation as it was in the first century.
Recent press reports tell us To be or not to be has now been restored to Act Three. I haven鈥檛 heard either version. But in truth I applaud the experiment. If we treasure something, whether our best known playwright or the faith we live by, we want to share it with others.
First, though, we must be in love with the original. Re-present the message, yes: fresh and for our time. But keep the message.

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