Mad about the Bard

At school there was a group of us who thought that Samuel Beckett was the coolest person on the planet. What could be more thrilling than the apocalyptic minimalism of a play featuring two people who lived in dustbins? We found validation for our passion when a teacher drew our attention to the Polish critic Jan Kott’s essay comparing Beckett’s Endgame with King Lear in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary. Intrigued, I read the rest of the book. Kott brought Shakespeare into the present with a passion I’d never encountered before in any other work of literary criticism. I particularly liked his claim that if Titus Andronicus had had a sixth act, Shakespeare would have used it to turn machine-guns on the audience. This instilled in me a lifelong love of the Bard’s principal gore-fest and the idea of staging a ‘happening’ in the school drama festival in which we began with some Shakespearean dialogue and then had some friends burst into the auditorium in combat fatigues and balaclavas, fake weapons in hand.