How Dare We?

Keith Knight (1956 - 2007) was my best friend for 25 years.  We met doing Cyrano de Bergerac at the Shaw Festival in 1983, and stayed in constant contact from then on. I created Shakespeare Out Loud with Keith Knight: he was my reading partner.  We debated and read together for hundreds of hours over the two years of creating the series. I did the cutting, formatting and noting, but nothing was ever finished until Keith and I had played it aloud and decided it couldn’t be improved. If we disagreed, we debated until we settled. Keith rarely dug his heels in, but when he did, he always proved right. I miss him daily.

Keith knew his Shakespeare extremely well and could almost recite Hamlet. He had researched all the Folio texts and knew the opinions of many scholars on most lines. He also had extensive knowledge about famous stage productions and films. He was the perfect Bard-buddy. Keith never went to university, but as the child of two teachers he was the most knowledgeable person I have ever known. He owned thousands of books and tapes. You could google it, or ask Keith knight.

So, for all those skeptics out there who say, “Who are you to abridge Shakespeare?” Well I wasn’t alone. Just as Shakespeare had his company, I had Keith. Keith is half the reason the texts work so well out loud. They were created as duets. Keith and I just kept reading and listening and refining until they all sounded right.

I learned about Shakespeare and how to listen from many people: from Rudy Shelly at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School, from the great actors in those Robin Phillips Shakespearean productions in the early 80s at Stratford, from Peter Ustinov who I was around and on stage with constantly for two runs of King Lear, from Heath Lamberts, whose Cyrano was brilliant.  I was also in Brian Bedford’s brilliantly cut Titus Andronicus and Michael Langham’s carefully molded Timon of Athens. I watched what these great artists did with Shakespearean texts and listened to how they sounded. When raising kids and doing mediocre TV for a living, I coached hundreds of students for thousands of hours for theatre and theatre school auditions – all listening. I also did brief time at universities and theatre schools. All this listening made me sure how these texts should sound. Keith and I just finalized them and then I put them on a page so modern youth could quickly understand and practice them.

We dared; we had to dare. If Keith were still alive he would still be daring with me. Teenagers have hated Shakespeare for as long as I can remember: they have hated our greatest dramatic artist. Even I would love to punch my old grade nine teacher, for starting me off on Richard 11. I hated Shakespeare too until I got my first role. Shakespeare Out Loud, when practiced, gives everyone a role, and a solid chance of actually loving Shakespeare. That’s how we dared.