The iron grip that literary estates sometimes exercise over the work in their charge is constantly put to the test: on the one hand, it’s their job to protect the author’s work and reputation in whose charge they are put, and on the other, also to exploit the properties as best they can to allow that work to live on (and earn as much money for the author’s designated beneficiaries, too).
One of the estates that are most insistent on extreme fidelity to the spirit and the word of its author is that of Samuel Beckett, whose work has a famous formality that can’t, it seems, be breached. Director Deborah Warner and actress Fiona Shaw famously fell short of this command when they re-imagined Footfalls – whose text specifies that it be performed along a narrow strip of stage – as a piece that was Shaw performed at various locations around the Garrick Theatre.
But news from Rome is that the estate has failed in their legal challenge against a production of Waiting for Godot in Tuscany that cast two women as the tramps Vladimir and Estragon. While Beckett had, during his own lifetime, previously objected to use women in the roles, the theatre here countered that though it was a pair of identical twin sisters who were playing them, the characters remained totally male, and there was no attempt to alter the play in any way. The director of the production Robert Bacci was quoted in The Guardian saying, “Silvia and Luisa look like men on stage and I chose them because they have played male roles before. We have used the text in its entirety and have in all other ways remained completely faithful to Beckett’s work… There is no element in the directing, acting, costumes or make-up that refer to a change in the characters.”
The court in Rome supported them, ruling that men do not therefore have a monopoly on the roles. As the theatre’s company lawyer Maurizio Fritelli comments, the ruling “is valuable, not just form the technical point of view of the interpretation of the law. It reiterates that men and women have equal rights, given that it still seems necessary to point this out.”
In London, Fiona Shaw (again) has proved this point, playing Richard II at the National, while Vanessa Redgrave played Prospero at Shakespeare’s Globe, an Frances de la Tour once played Hamlet. Thank goodness Shakespeare doesn’t have a literary estate; he seems to be robust enough to withstand most directors’ intrusions.
But an estate needn’t always be obstructive: a strong estate, creatively and proactively managed – such as the Rodgers and Hammerstein estate in New York, or the Coward estate here – can actually expand the repertoire of “performable” work. Some of the work may, in the original form, be virtually unplayable; so R&H have authorised new versions of shows like Flower Drum Song and The Boys from Syracuse, for instance, to be created that brought them back into the repertoire. And the Coward estate allowed the director Christopher Luscombe free reign over his final play Star Quality that saw it return to the West End in 2001 in a form it would never have reached there at all otherwise.
