In January this year I was invited by British actor and theatre director Stuart Cox to see a casting workshop in Havana, Cuba, for a new production of William Shakespeare’s Pericles (in Spanish).
It’s a brave, exciting and sexy project that has been programmed for June 2016 and will be performed at the Casona en Linea in the old residential area of Vedado – amongst the beautiful and rotting mansions where the much written about sofas on balconies and clotheslines hang from windows onto makeshift poles hanging over the street.
Vedado tremulous and defiant where only a single beggar roams and traffic amounts to largely old fifties Chevrolets passing Russian bicycles slightly faster than walking pace.
Cox began his workshop with ancient circle dances from Macedonia and Greece which he had learnt at the Findhorn Foundation in the early eighties. It is something he always does. Intricate and simple foot weaving, hands held, both fusing and relaxing.
These Cuban actors totally absorbed, totally committed and in their bodies from the outset. It is striking how expressive this is. The Caribbean way of strutting syntax and dancing thought and Cox intends to use it to best advantage whilst using the context of Cuba itself, finding home grown cultural equivalents – a boxing tournament replacing knights in armour- a Cuban Santeria priest heals Pericles’ wife who is thought to have died.
Pericles goes Caribbean!
I witnessed various improvised tasks of ‘the arrested being accused and the dealing out of death penalties’. Actors going directly to places they knew all too well. Asked to touch either the heart, the mind and the belly of the audience, they chose, in groups, unconscious themes that were close to them personally.
Revolutionary against anti-revolutionary – Commanders in Chief. Sex offenders and sex tourism complete with the inevitable enthused overplay of flirtatious ‘wiggle and waggle’, – displaying the heated tensions of tourist and prostitute with tenacity and knife-cut timing.
Cox originally had the idea of offering a workshop to show solidarity with the isolated Cuban actors. He linked up with Carlos Diaz, director of Havana’s acclaimed Teatro El Publico, who encouraged his young actors to participate in the workshop. It took place in October 2014, two months before the diplomatic thaw between the Obama administration and Raul Castro which heralds a huge change of epochs.
A further invitation from the Cuban cultural authorities to direct a full Shakespeare production in Havana came serendipitously at this historic time. And the decision to mount a production of one of Shakespeare’s last plays, Pericles, coincided with similar international focus on Shakespeare during this year of the 400th anniversary of his death.
Stuart Cox is driven to create theatre in different countries. He has also become something of an international Shakespeare specialist during his 45-year career, giving workshops on the acting of Shakespeare in Britain, India, the US, Mexico and now Cuba.
His company ‘Celebrating Cultures’ seeks to merge cultural themes and Cox has directed, written and acted in productions from villages in the Rajasthan desert to mining towns in Mexico, using the folklore, myth and magic of the region to local audiences of all proportions.
Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s less typical plays, and originally set in the Mediterranean, transplants effortlessly to the Caribbean, from one sea to another where Pericles is shipwrecked. It’s extreme and complex, myriad surreptitious coincidences compelling the audience to take sides.
Pericles takes part in two contests to win a bride, believes his wife to have died at sea in childbirth and that his daughter, 14 years later, has also died only to be reunited with both of them.
Pirates sell his daughter to a brothel and his wife isn’t really dead. And so it goes, suspension of disbelief continually hanging by a thread in this incestuous, twisting tale of great loss and greater redemption filled with warriors, assassins, pirates, fishermen and whores.
With the extremity of Shakespeare melding on the edges of Cuba’s cup of surrealist woe, wonder and wisdom, the nation’s political, religious and unforgiving passion couldn’t fit a better Elizabethan glove.
It was raining on the day of the Pericles workshop. It had been raining for several days and streets were getting harder to negotiate. On exceptionally rainy days in Havana, it is as though time has ceased to exist. Appointments are explicitly unkept as roads turn into rivers. Bus stops are too small to shelter. And there are simply not enough collectivo taxis for the demand.
The workshop venue had already been changed three times due to last minute cancellations. A not uncommon occurrence. Phones calls were made and then made again as each member of the cast was called personally on landlines in this land of limited net. But on this rain-filled early January day, 11 of the 15 professional actors already cast, turned up for the workshop through which their roles in Pericles would be finally allocated. A minor miracle.
The workshop took place in an events room of the Riviera Hotel situated across the street from the Malecón sea wall which keeps the Atlantic Ocean at bay. The Riviera was built by the gangster Mayer Lansky in 1958 for $8 million and its design was based on a Las Vegas hotel.
Nationalised within two years of the Cuban Revolution, lack of money for renovation means that today it is a glorious time warp to the fifties, with original murals, furniture, bar and fittings to retro drool over. Cox had hired a basement that came with a small fan that blew up the moment it was plugged in.
I wondered if the current wave of change and the New Year gave impetus to the actors’ enthusiasm or was it simply that because for the first time a British theatre director is in Havana to direct Shakespeare. Or at least the first time in the memories of these young actors, one of whom still eats his food off the plate in a bolt of flight an unconscious leftover from the ‘special period’ and the 90’s economic depression when the Soviet Union pulled out of Cuba and food was scarce.
As intense, pure and undiluted as the workshop, is what the final show promises to be – a Promenade Production (‘Teatro Itinerante’), within the grounds of the 19th century mansion La Casona, currently in renovation and an important arts venue with black box theatre, garden and out buildings all of which will transform into royal residences, ships and brothels.
Audiences will be kept small. Up close, personal and space-defiant. Actors emerging from unexpected entrances and exits.
A ‘which way to look and what will come next?’ production.
Unpredictable, challenging and exciting. A mirror to the new Cuba?
Pericles, Prince of Havana by William Shakespeare is now in rehearsal. Performances will take place in June, 2016. It will be performed in Spanish in a new translation by Salvador Oliva and Angel Luis Pujante.
Julianne Chadwick is the author of “To The Other Side”
