John Walker's Electronic House

I’ve been meaning to post about this for a while, and was reminded to when discussing with Kim the difficulties that come with teaching Hamlet to teenagers. (Kim’s a remarkable teacher – I’ve seen her at work, and she has an ability to connect with minds and communicate difficult subjects that I wish most my teachers would have known a fraction of).

Slings & Arrows is one of the most wonderful television programmes to have been made, and yet you’ve never heard of it. Made and broadcast in Canada, it’s only been broadcast on the Sundance Channel in the US, and never in the UK. Why never is a mystery (to which a possible answer might be something to do with Celebrity Come Dancing and Deal Or No Deal). [EDIT: Apparently it has, kind of. See comments]

It’s about a theatre in fictional Canadian town, New Burbage, and the New Burbage Theatre Festival – a season of plays put on twice a year, seen from both the perspective of the actors and crew, and the management. Paul Gross plays Geoffrey Tennant, a former member of the company who left almost a decade after a nervous breakdown during a performance of Hamlet. It was, we are told, the greatest portrayal of Hamlet since Burton. But it only lasted two and a half performances. Now Tennant, after some time in an asylum, is attempting to direct a run-down theatre company in something like a village hall, with no money and lots of debts. Back in the city, his former director, the perfectly camp Oliver Welles, is attempting to put on Hamlet once more. Jaded, mostly drunk, and having lost all fight against the corporate sponsors of his theatre, he has a medium-strong cast (including one or two terrible actors), and a male Hollywood action star looking to add a serious role to his resume.

By the end of the first episode Welles is dead, but not quite as dead as Tennant would like. Cajoled into coming back to fill in for Welles temporarily, Tennant finds that his former director hasn’t really left the building, and is instead haunting him as a ghost. (Paul Gross presumably has it in his contract that he must be haunted by grumpy old men in all his roles). And so, with the ghosts of his past literally hanging around him, Tennant sets about creating Hamlet from these scraps.

Everything is so utterly perfect. To give an example, the weakest aspect of Studio 60 is not the sketches, but the show’s depency on your believing its show-within is the funniest thing on American television. Clearly no one believes this, as they’ve yet to show us a glimpse of a convincingly funny sketch (maybe apart from that Dateline one). Slings & Arrows asks us to believe that Tennant, Welles, and lead actress Ellen Fanshaw put on the greatest Hamlet in decades, and then goes on to make you believe that they very much could have.

This is perhaps a large part due to a good number of the cast being involved in the real world Stratford Festival, and putting on Shakespeare productions for years. The programme was created by the wondrous Mark McKinney (former Kid in the Hall, also playing the pathetically malleable (and wonderfully named) Richard Smith-Jones, the theatre’s business manager), Susan Coyne (playwright and actress) and comedian Bob Martin. They all play characters in the show, and write most the scripts.

What makes it truly great, beyond the stunning acting, fantastically funny scenes, and joyful interplay between Tennant and Welles, is the passion for the plays. Series one (each series has a very British six episodes) is about Hamlet, with a splash of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, series two MacBeth, and the as yet unreleased (and therefore unseen by me) series three about King Lear. It is at its most magical when Tennant is helping an actor gain an understanding of his/her character, or trying to present choices for how to approach a scene. Two of my favourites are below.

This first clip is Tennant trying to convince the ghastly actor playing Ophelia to understand the madness her songs are meant to portray. Bear with her insanely annoying spinning for the first minute, and then wait for the spinal shivers as Tennant gets going.

The second is Tennant working with Hollywood star Jack Crew, attempting to get him to finally stop improvising his lines into modern language, and reveal the actor he believes Crew can be.