This is my last Shakespeare review for this journal, and a good thing too. Most of the Shakespeare productions I saw this year were really adaptations. Almost all were ‘presentist’. This does not mean that I didn’t enjoy many of them, just that my particular kind of expertise was largely useless: their ideal reviewer would be a social historian or an expert on popular culture. Because the collective tendency seemed to me significant, I am covering more productions than usual, and, because they were dominated by a directorial vision, I am naming only directors. This is of course unfair to the actors, but the abundance of online reviews means that anyone can supplement my accounts. Directors often seemed to rely on their audience’s previous experience or expectations of the plays, which is presumably why they mostly confined themselves to the same small group that everyone already knows.

Shakespeare was to be seen everywhere in 2022 – sometimes in person. He was a character in two West End productions: Ben Elton’s stage version of The Upstart Crow, and the musical & Juliet (by David West Read and Max Martin); by the time you read this, he will also have appeared in Hamnet, a dramatization of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford. In all three, he is overshadowed by clever, unjustly forgotten women. If Shakespeare in Love (1998) implies that woman’s role is simply to provide the great sex that enables great writing in men, other fictitious Shakespeares have owed a more intellectual debt.

A crucial feature of Sean Holmes’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, first performed in 2019, was the recruitment at each performance of a different audience member to play Starveling, with the sympathy and encouragement of the rest of the cast. He had very few actual words to speak, but, during the Pyramus and Thisbe performance, his job was to keep pumping the organ that (supposedly) kept the lights functioning on the amateur stage; at the end, sent back to his seat, he was generously applauded. Though in the 2021 revival this part of the play was somewhat diluted by the need to keep him at a safe distance from the actors, it still produced some enjoyable moments and a final round of applause. In retrospect, it also strikes me as emblematic of 2021: it was a year in which plenty of amateurs got to play Shakespeare (in numerous online Zoom reading groups) and in which, even when theatres reopened, focus was as much on the audience as on the play. Theatre, never considered a particularly safe medium, suddenly had to think of safety at all costs (and the costs were often horrendous).

In its 2020 issue, Cahiers Elisabéthains focused on the various experiences of Shakespeare in the early months of lockdown. Reviewers (disclosure: I was one) frequently commented on the difference in their level of engagement when they watched a play alone in their room, and I shall return later to this issue. But they also noted the one unquestionable advantage of digital theatre: none of its seats has restricted views. Of course, the computer’s view is restricted, especially in livestream, but we don’t usually notice the limitation of our viewpoint because we assume that, as in film, there is an intention behind it.