Brick Shakespeare: The Comedies
Construction and Photography by John McCann. Edited and narrated by Monica Sweeney and Becky Thomas. (Skyhorse Publishing, 2014)
Since irony is a big element in John McCann, Monica Sweeney & Becky Thomass LEGO-block adaptations of classic literature, it’s no surprise that they did a volume of Shakespeare tragedies before tackling the comedies. (Before that, they did both testaments of the Bible.)
Yet the plastic-block medium is far better suited to A Midsummer Night’s Dream The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew than it is to Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Julius Caesar.
These are reasonable, consistently amusing stagings of some of the greatest comic love battles in literary history. They just happen to be built with LEGOs.
The shows come in book form. The direction (or, as the credit here reads, “construction and photography”) observes traditional theatrical form, with backdrops and a proscenium feel. Except that when these actors hit their marks, the holes in their feet click onto the bumps in the stage.
You could say the acting is wooden, but actually it’s plastic, which is more flexible. The performers stand still, with fixed expressions, but those expressions—and their arm gestures—can change from one photo to the next. The photos are captioned with lines from Shakespeare; they’d be pretty hard to follow otherwise, but not impossible.
The settings and (molded) costumes are colorful and dynamic. Seriously, you can—and should—take this stuff seriously as an artform. (I speak as the son of a man who famously performed Greek tragedies with marionettes.) Static, tableau-style stagings can carry a lot of visual information; just check out all the Shakespeare-themed paintings at the Yale Center for British Art. There are some wild interpretations to be found in Brick Shakespeare. Much Ado’s Hero bears a grinning skull face while pretending to be dead. At the beginning of the Tempest, there’s a full boat getting tossed in the storm, with nearly a dozen men aboard. Ariel literally glows, with a photo-retouching effect.
Some ideas are suspect. In the Pyramus and Thisbe playlet inside Midsummer’s, the wall through which the lovers speak is represented with the little LEGO guy designated as Snout the tinker. But if you’ve got a zillion LEGO bricks on hand, why wouldn’t you build a freakin’ wall out of those?
These are not uncut productions. They consist of specific scenes from the plays, with text synopses filling in the gaps. But a lot more is staged that you have any reason to expect, and the stories are fully told.
My nine-year-old daughter Sally, who admittedly has no fear of Shakespeare and has recently seen several movie and play versions of his comedies, ran off with this book and read it from cover to cover. We don’t happen to have LEGOs in the house, so she didn’t take to it as a craft project or a humor book. She dug the stories.
