It recently occurred to me that I might enjoy watching plays on a screen – watching them in real life being prohibitively expensive – so I checked out a number of relevant websites. I settled on National Theatre at Home, which has performances from numerous venues and production companies in addition to the National Theatre. I took out a monthly subscription for £9.99.

I thought I’d start with Present Laughter (1939), a light comedy by Noel Coward, the British playwright who died in 1972. He openly acknowledged that the camp central character Garry Essendine (an anagram of “neediness”) was based on himself, but Coward never publicly admitted his own sexuality.

I was enjoying the play until it took a turn I couldn’t believe had been written by Coward, let alone appear on stage during his lifetime. Garry is seduced by “Joe”, a white man who (Garry knows) is already in a sexual relationship with a black man. So I checked out the bones of Coward’s original plot on Wikipedia, to discover that Garry is seduced by “Joanna”, the glamorous wife of his producer.

I stopped watching the play. This sort of “re-imagining” is, for me at least, unacceptable. I see no difference between it and someone adding figures to a Pre-Raphaelite painting, cars on the roads, and a plane or two in the sky.

Next I checked out Macbeth, in modern dress. You may be relieved to know that the central character, played by Ralph Fiennes, was not himself wearing a modern dress. I mean the costumes were modern. It didn’t take long before I started to note some ‘progressive’ editing of the script – one of the witches is played by a black woman, possibly unusual in 11th century Scotland? – so I checked the original screenplay to see if the dialogue (at least) was accurate. It didn’t take me long to discover it wasn’t a faithful reproduction of the original, even allowing for translation into Modern English. I shall not be renewing my National Theatre at Home subscription when it expires.

Gerry had already recommended Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew to me, on the basis that feminists hate the play, so I’d probably enjoy it. But like all Shakespeare’s plays, it’s difficult to follow because so many of the English words are unfamiliar to modern readers. I spent a little time looking into Modern English translations, and came across an excellent (free) website with translations of 41 Shakespearean plays.

The Table of Contents for The Taming of the Shrew is here. If you click on “Induction, Scene 1” you’ll arrive here, showing the original text in the left-hand column, the modern translation in the next column. That way you’ll know how faithful the translation is to the original. This particular translation was the work of a young American man, and so far, I’m impressed.

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