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Woke madness continues as classic Shakespeare play slapped with trigger warning because it featured violence and death

Scottish Sun

15-06-2025

Entertainment
Scottish Sun

Woke madness continues as classic Shakespeare play slapped with trigger warning because it featured violence and death

ROMEO and Juliet has been hit with a trigger warning — with audiences informed it featured violent scenes and death. Shakespeare's classic 16th-century love story has been 'retold' as a modern ballet. 1 William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet has been hit with a bizarfre trigger warning Credit: Alamy But London's Royal Opera House deemed it necessary to warn potential visitors the production includes themes of 'violence and death'. Sir Ian McKellen, who has appeared in Romeo and Juliet productions throughout his career, previously hit out at 'ludicrous' warnings. He said: 'I quite like to be surprised by loud noises and outrageous behaviour on stage.' It comes four years after The Globe in London warned of 'upsetting' themes in the play, and provided a number for The Samaritans. They were even provided a number for the Samaritans for after the show. Actor Christopher Biggins said: 'Do we have to have signs for everything under the sun? 'It's a joke. What they are trying to do is insulting to the mentality of theatre-goers.' The Globe has also warned about themes of 'violence, sexual references, misogyny and racism' in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, as well as 'anti-semitism' in The Merchant of Venice. In February, the University of the West of England slapped over 200 trigger warnings on Shakespeare's work - including 'bad weather' in The Tempest. The Royal Opera House was asked to comment.

Julie Jay: We must teach children that nothing in life is guaranteed

Irish Examiner

10-06-2025

Entertainment
Irish Examiner

Julie Jay: We must teach children that nothing in life is guaranteed

This week, there was a bit of a furore among parents, students, and teachers about a short story appearing as a question in studied texts on the higher level Junior Cert. Teachers with a social media presence did their best to assuage the fears of students who had been caught short when asked to write about a short story they had studied, an option which, though part of the syllabus, hadn't previously featured on the Junior cert exam. 'I just wrote about Of Mice and Men, is that okay?' asked one Junior Cert commentator. Another student said they had written about the movie ET, while another referred to The Merchant of Venice. The answer to all of the above is a firm 'no', with teachers expressing as much to students who reached out online. Of course, they cushioned the blow with a reminder that exams, much less questions worth 15 marks, were not something to be sweating over, especially the Junior Cert, which will no doubt be the first thing consigned to the scrap heap of history when robots take over the world. But as a parent, the big lesson I hope kids, and indeed their respective parents, will take away from this mini-controversy is that nothing is guaranteed in life. Exams can be arbitrary, and even unfair, because life itself is often arbitrary and unfair. The most important thing we can do for our small people (and ourselves) is to help build their resilience. On the subject of resilience, Number One is facing his last week of naíonara before big school next year, and I can scarcely believe it. I could throw out all the clichés here, because they all apply: it seems like only yesterday we were sending him off to naíonara for his induction day, how the last two years have been the fastest of my life. As I approach the end of this phase, I can't help but be a little emotional about it all, which, given my comedy persona, is very much a sad clown, is pretty on brand for me. The last two years have been wonderful for Number One, although I'm not saying we've aced all aspects. We still find it hard to wait our turn to go in the morning, pushing through the queue and jumping up and down at the front door, much like a 45-year-old dad pushes through the crowds to get to the mosh pit of a Stereophonics concert, and with a similar disregard for innocent bystanders. What I can categorically state though is that Number One is definitely a little more resilient than he was starting two years ago, a resilience which comes with age, of course, but also comes with having to take turns with the Lego and being patient and work with others, even when they insist on eating egg sandwiches at lunch. Above all, I hope he is kind. And if he encounters a lack of kindness in others, he will stand his ground a little and accept that things don't always go your way. A few weeks back, when chatting with his teacher, she professed as much: that Number One was much better at sticking up for himself now, a bit stronger in standing his ground, and a little slower always to outsource the handling of a minor conflict to a teacher. While we want them to know when to ask for help, we also don't want them to be running to the múinteoir with trivialities like 'Timmy has the green marker' and 'Jamie just said my T-shirt is pink and it's red.' (Although to be fair, this is annoying). Resilience is understanding that sometimes things will go wrong and being able to adjust our expectations accordingly. Much like when the orange jumpsuit you purchased online arrives looking less boho-casual and more Guantanamo Bay casual, these little curveballs in life are a reminder that we just have to make the best of things. But it's not just kids who learn resilience through schooling, it's parents too. Because part of being a parent is knowing that things will go wrong and keeping these plot twists right-sized. There have been many moments over the last two years when I've had a wobble and questioned what kind of parent I am. I have forgotten coats, and World Book Days, and on occasion even forgotten a lunch (I look forward to the day I take up my role as President of Ireland and Number One's ham sandwich gets a garda escort to school). But it's all about bouncing back, because that's what we're also trying to instil in them. What I hope is that Number One is a little tougher than he was bounding into the naíonara in September 2023. Because while we never want them to lose their softness, life will demand that they have to be strong. They have to be able to roll with the punches, without throwing any. Reading about parents getting upset about the curveball Junior Cert question this week, we need to remember to keep it all in perspective. One of the most important things we can do as parents is to help our kids deal with life's little red herrings. Because when it comes to it, as Forrest Gump nearly said, life is like an English Junior Cert paper — you never know what you're going to get. Read More Julie Jay: Give parents a break and let them take children on holiday in term time

The political parallels of Trump and Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice'

IOL News

19-05-2025

Politics
IOL News

The political parallels of Trump and Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice'

Ramaphosa should go no further than only saying 'I do' to the laws he signed and not give an inch beyond for the 49 Afrikaners who were Trump's flagship and pound of flesh have a Portia 'not a drop of blood' addendum to them as Trump tries to cut his pound of flesh. Image: AFP The second coming of Trump on the political platform of the United States with his arse open for would be wiling lickers reminds me of Shylock, the money lender in the Merchant of Venice. But the book comes with entertaining memories. In 1969 at the age of twelve I was in the seventh year of schooling and a year shy away from sitting for the exit exams that would qualify me to enter the five year duration of secondary and high school study. In my class were some distinguished veteran scholars who were aged 25 and 26 years respectively. These veterans had been on it from the day my eldest brother who is thirteen years older than myself set foot in school. They had been in class with each of my four siblings subsequently and ultimately myself. I was the last to share experience of studying with them. Our set book was The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare the greatest author of literature. Those who read the work of Shakespeare will know how complex it is to read it. It comes deep with Victorian English of thou and shalt and third person expressions and long complex sentences. In the 20th Century Shakesperean writing appear akin to English. It is not easy to read. By way of background Shylock, the Jew was a shrewd money lender and between himself and Antonio, a wealthy merchant, there was no love lost. Antonio had his dear friend Bassanio, who needed money. Antonio borrowed money from his worst enemy. A bond was signed for the money and Antonio offered a pound of flesh that would be cut from his left breast should the money fail to be delivered on the day. Shylock would perform the act of slicing out the pound of flesh. A sure death sentence to his enemy, Antonio. As fate would have it, Antonio's fleet of ships could not arrive on time and Shylock sought justice. But even as the ships arrived, but late, Shylock would have none of it but wanted justice - his pound of flesh. We had to act play the Merchant of Venice and often the teacher will nominate those who should read. The veterans were always reluctant to do so given the complexity of the English and the Shakespearean structure. On this afternoon, we had to act play Chapter 4 from page 88 and surprise, surprise Mrs Mabusa asked for volunteers this time around. One of the veterans raised his hand and Pinkie Motloha who was seated next to me and I started giggling, so was the rest of the class burst in laughter in anticipation. And we raised our hands too. But the order of selection was by who raised their hands first. The veteran was first. You see page 88 starts with two short sentences and subsequent ones are massive paragraphs. The veteran volunteered himself to be Antonio. At that the giggles turned into massive laughter because not only does Antonio answer with a short sentence of 'I do' when Portia the lawyer asks, 'Do you confess this bond?' but that is the only utterance Antonio he makes in the whole section. Of course, after regaling the court with sentences that were appealing to Shylock and the Jew was getting ready for his pound of flesh, Portia made the most devastating sentence to Shylock – not a drop of blood should be shed. The Duke affirmed the legal standing of that ordering Shylock to cut one and only a pound and no blood shed. Shylock was about to collapse as he forfeited not only the pound of flesh but the money that was borrowed. Perhaps when asked about the laws he signed, Ramaphosa should go no further than only saying 'I do' to the laws he signed and not give an inch beyond for the 49 Afrikaners who were Trump's flagship and pound of flesh have a Portia 'not a drop of blood' addendum to them as Trump tries to cut his pound of flesh. This is the 'no drop of blood addendum.' Whilst South African government has performed very badly on the economy, crime, corruption and everything else. They have not lied about the facts as these are not only in the reports of the Statistician-General, they are also in our faces. What is also in our faces regarding these numbers is the fact that Whites only have a 6.5% unemployment rate, a mere 2 percentage points above the US unemployment of 4.3 %. This is a far cry from the 43% unemployment rate of the Blacks. The data of the Statistician-General shows that 73% of Whites are in the fifth quintile as opposed to only 13.7% amongst Blacks. Of course, duplicity ridden Trump will turn the tables against Ramaphosa and question his governance over poverty of the Black. He may well justify the massive inequality gap as one leaving Whites with no option but to fear for the greedy eyes of Blacks over White god given accumulation. He may well ask for guarantees. Ramaphosa has to stick to 'yes I do' regarding the bills he signed into law. No more no less. He should leave Trump's arse to trump. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, a Research Associate at Oxford University, and a distinguished Alumni of the University of Ghana. He is the former Statistician-General of South Africa. Dr Pali Lehohla is a Professor of Practice at the University of Johannesburg, among other hats. Image: Supplied BUSINESS REPORT

Othello and Iago, a Marriage Made in Both Heaven and Hell

New York Times

31-03-2025

Entertainment
New York Times

Othello and Iago, a Marriage Made in Both Heaven and Hell

Who exactly is in charge here? Is it the strutting general or his self-effacing ensign? The man celebrated for his 'free and open nature' or the sociopath who keeps stockpiling secrets? That question has been occupying the minds of theatergoers and readers since Shakespeare's 'Othello' was first performed in London in the early 17th century. And it is doubtless being puzzled over by audiences at the star-charged Broadway revival of this tragedy of homicidal jealousy, with Denzel Washington in the title role of the noble Moorish warrior and Jake Gyllenhaal as Iago, his eminently credible, equally duplicitous aide-de-camp. On the most basic level, the answer is obvious. (For those unfamiliar with 'Othello,' serious spoilers follow.) It's the resentment-riddled Iago, the ultimate disgruntled employee, who takes command of his commander, and pretty much everyone in his orbit, in coldblooded pursuit of revenge. It's Iago who gives the orders to his boss, while making his boss believe otherwise. And it's Iago who's still alive at the end. But in another sense, the contest has never been that easy to call. Put it this way: After you've seen it, who is it who dominates your thoughts? Which character's point of view wound up ruling the night? In other words, who owned the production? Othello may have the glamour, the grand poetic speeches and a death scene for the ages. But there is a reason that Laurence Olivier, who would play the part blackface to divisive effect in the early 1960s, would worry about having 'the stage stolen from me by some young and brilliant Iago.' 'Othello' is Shakespeare's only major work in which the hero and antihero are given equal weight. (If you keep score by monologues, Iago has eight of them; Othello only three.) And as the Shakespeare scholar Harold Bloom summed up the dichotomy: It is Othello's tragedy, but it is Iago's play. There is another way, of course, in which 'Othello' is singular in Shakespeare. Its leading man is Black, and for centuries he was almost always portrayed by white men with dark makeup. And it is as impossible now to see 'Othello' without thinking of racism as it is to revisit 'The Merchant of Venice' without thinking of antisemitism. It was Paul Robeson — the titanic actor, singer and political activist — who cracked open the door for the many Black Othellos who have followed, though white classic theater stars (including Anthony Hopkins and Michael Gambon) would continue to take on the role. Robeson's debuts in London in 1930 and on Broadway in 1943 were watersheds, by any measure, and wildly acclaimed. 'A tragedy of racial conflict' was how Robeson described 'Othello,' who said, around the time of the London run in 1930, that he was 'killing two birds with one stone' in performing the part: 'I'm acting and I'm talking for the Negroes in the way only Shakespeare can.' Yet reflecting on his own portrayal of Othello some 50 years later, Willard White (the renowned opera singer) said, 'One thing you have to remember is that he's not a jealous Black man, he's a jealous man.' He added: 'Of course the issues in the play are partly racial, but for me they're not the defining factor.' It is far more than race, in fact, that defines Othello's otherness. He inhabits an empyrean realm where emotions are absolute and belief unconditional. Small wonder he's easy prey for someone as completely worldly as Iago. The fatal clash between the two men is that of two irreconcilable approaches to life. In the ideal 'Othello,' each of these warring worldviews seems to feed the fire of its opposite. Then a magnificent conflagration ensues. As the following list attests, such perfect chemical balances occur only rarely. Paul Robeson and Maurice Browne By all accounts, Robeson's opening night at the Savoy Theater was one of those extraordinary evenings when an audience felt it had witnessed history in the making, and it ended in 20 curtain calls. 'Old playgoers searching their memories can recall no such scene in a London theater in many years,' G.W. Bishop wrote in The New York Times. This was, after all, the first Black actor to appear on a mainstream London stage as Othello in nearly a century, when another American, Ira Aldridge, briefly took over from an ailing Edmund Kean. Never mind that, as Iago, Browne (also the play's producer) registered as 'some incommensurate gnat,' according to the fabled critic James Agate. The booming-voiced Robeson brought out the deepest purple in many reviewers' prose. The Observer's Ivor Brown described him as 'a superb giant of the woods for the great hurricane of tragedy to whisper through, then rage upon, then break.' Paul Robeson and José Ferrer It took 13 years for Robeson's singular, boundary-shattering brand of Shakespearean lightning to strike in Manhattan. But this production, astutely directed by Margaret Webster, was a more unconditional triumph. It helped that Ferrer's Iago was, as Lewis Nichols put it in The Times, 'a half dancing, half strutting Mephistopheles.' (Desdemona was, if you please, Uta Hagen, Ferrer's wife, who became Robeson's lover.) At a time when anti-miscegenation laws were still on the books in the States, there were worries that the interracial love affair might alienate audiences. But the opening-night ovations were again thunderous, and reviews were largely ecstatic. (The Herald Tribune described it as a 'tribute to the art that transcends racial boundaries.') The production broke records for a Shakespeare play on Broadway, clocking 296 performances. Laurence Olivier and Frank Finlay Those who saw Olivier's Calypso-cadenced Moor onstage swear he was mesmerizing. His 'power, passion and verisimilitude,' wrote the critic in The Sunday Times of London, 'will be spoken of with wonder for a long time to come.' (Finlay's Iago, on the other hand, was dismissed in The New York Times as 'mercurial at best and trivial at worst.') But captured on film the next year, Olivier's blackface makeup and exaggerated mannerisms registered as grotesque and, to many, deeply offensive. A university professor recently discovered it was not a film to show latter-day students. James Earl Jones and Christopher Plummer Jones's imposing presence and resonant baritone made him a natural for the Moor, whom he first portrayed for the New York Shakespeare Festival when he was 23 in 1964. On Broadway, 18 years later, the Times's Frank Rich observed of Jones that the 'ease and authority as a military commander seem his by birthright, even as he maintains the uneasy aloofness of an outsider.' But it was Plummer who really wowed Rich, who wrote that this Iago 'gives us peeks into a nihilistic void of a soul — a mysterious, inexplicable blackness that is horrifying precisely because it cannot be explained away.' Willard White and Ian McKellen An opera star of mighty voice and physique, White proved a stately (and mellifluous) Othello. But it was McKellen's take on Iago — as a salt-of-the-earth, pipe-smoking old soldier in a 19th-century uniform — who haunted the imagination with his unblinking matter-of-factness. Trevor Nunn's interpretation for the Royal Shakespeare Company, in a 100-seat theater, brought out the play's emotional claustrophobia and — more important for future productions — the sense of characters shaped and confined by a military ethos. Patrick Stewart and Ron Canada In this racially reversed production by the British director Jude Kelly, Stewart's 'vigorous, sinewy' Othello was the only white character onstage. The approach, Peter Marks wrote in The Times, 'does not tilt the play toward ham-handed irony; rather, it tends to take the racial issue off the table.' While Stewart, Marks said, was 'devastatingly human,' Canada's Iago was 'dishearteningly wooden.' David Harewood and Simon Russell Beale Sam Mendes's 'spellbinding,' Fascist-era production from the Royal National Theater was built around the conceit that Iago would be virtually invisible to everyone around him. Beale's chillingly summoned air of soldiery servitude and efficiency, I wrote in the Times, disguised the inner 'festering have-not, tired of being passed over.' Harewood's 'strapping, handsome' Moor was ultimately 'too overwrought and unvaried' to hold his own against this stealth saboteur. Keith David and Liev Schreiber In Doug Hughes's production at the Public Theater, all the world was Iago's stage and all the play's other characters merely puppets. Schreiber's truly terrifying Iago, my review noted, was 'a Mephistopheles who was born, as he sees it, not just to rebel against God but to usurp his function.' You could often find 'him in an aisle of the theater, looking on like the archetypal nervous director.' Never had it been clearer that Othello — portrayed by David in the style of 'a self-involved businessman' — was following his ensign's script. Chiwetel Ejiofor and Ewan McGregor In his review for The Times, Matt Wolf described McGregor's Iago as 'oddly blank.' But with the 'richly spoken' Ejiofor in the lead, the production 'restores pride of place to the play's fiercely tender, then rabidly jealous title character.' The London Observer's Susannah Clapp wrote, 'He is the best Othello I've ever seen: the best for generations.' John Douglas Thompson and Michael Hammond A genuinely majestic Thompson established himself as one of America's leading Shakespeareans with his Othello, a role he later played Off Broadway. His mellifluous speech and kingly bearing seemed, my review said, 'to create a cosmic divide between' the play's 'hero and those around him,' especially Hammond's weary functionary of an Iago. What separated Othello here was less his race than 'his greatness, the blessing and curse of feeling things too greatly and acting proportionately.' John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman From the internationally acclaimed experimentalist Peter Sellars, this high-tech production presented its characters as ordinary Americans locked in a domestic tragedy. 'The mighty, exotic general Othello and his diabolical flunky Iago have been stripped of their singularity, whether of greatness of spirit or capacity for evil.' Even the brilliant Hoffman fizzled. His Iago, my review said, was someone for whom 'revenge is a dish best served hot, like a Big Mac picked up on the fly.' Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear Nicholas Hytner's contemporary production made 'killing use of the pressures and protocol of military life abroad to explain how the play's homicides could happen.' Turning his uniform into camouflage for every occasion, Kinnear was the most disturbingly convincing liar of any Iago I have seen. Though played with bone-deep conviction by Lester — who also memorably portrayed Aldridge, the first Black Othello on London stages, in the historic play 'Red Velvet'— this Othello never stood a chance. David Oyelowo and Daniel Craig The most perfectly matched pair of moral combatants I have ever encountered in an 'Othello.' It was clear from the get-go that each carried his own doom within himself. Sam Gold's scorching version, set largely in the barracks of 'a no-exit theater of war,' presented 'the intimate spectacle of two disastrously different, equally great minds in collision.' With its stars 'at the top of their game, in a marriage made in both heaven and hell, the story of Othello and Iago could not possibly end otherwise than it does. 'And, O the pity of it!' I wrote. This may by the only 'Othello' at which I fully experienced that wrenching, breathless release we call catharsis.

‘The arts need to step up' in tense political times

CBC