Robert Ormsby: Adapting
Shakespeare
to Canada in the
Culture of Global Celebrity
If Canada
has a unique perspective on global popular culture, positioned as we
are next
to its point of origin (the United States), our relationship
to Shakespeare is less clear. This paper examines how Matthew
MacFadzean’s richardthesecond
borrows from Shakespeare’s Richard II in order to explore
media-saturated world-wide culture from a specifically Canadian
perspective.
MacFadzean develops loose parallels between the ageing raver Richie
Excellent
and king Richard II to lend his protagonist a tragic dimension.
MacFadzean uses
the sixteenth-century play as a rough framework for developing a
critique of
the celebrity of politics in the twenty-first century. The production
resembles
Shakespearean drama in that, like the early modern plays, the
multimedia and
topical richardthesecond requires specialized knowledge and
reading
skills: not only must its audiences be able to grasp the fast-moving
video and
musical sequences through which most of the play’s references to global
electronic culture occur, but they must possess an intimate knowledge
of
contemporary Canadian culture to understand the particular perspective
from
which this critique originates. In other words, richardthesecond
creates
a series of exclusions that diminish Shakespeare’s theatrical
centrality, and
complicate the image of a homogenizing international media leviathan.