Author: Nicholas Anastasia

There he is. Amidst a chorus of sword crashing against sword in a scene only hinted at by the Bard, there he is, the man we’ve come to see:  Sir Kenneth Branagh.

In the darkened Michigan Theater, my date and I squeal in excitement as this native of Northern Ireland dominates the screen with his rugged beard and flashing eyes. Yes, I do mean squeal, and yes, I am unabashedly a fanboy. I’m sure you can imagine my excitement at getting to watch him star as Macbeth in a live broadcast from the performance in Manchester that boasts of selling out in a mere nine minutes!

But perhaps you are wondering who this theatrical titan is, and I will endeavor to tell as best I can. If you watched the London 2012 Summer Olympics Opening Ceremony, then in addition to seeing the Queen become one of the newest Bond girls, you would have seen Branagh (in what might be confused for Abraham Lincoln-esque attire) delivering a speech from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. It is likely apparent by now, as it is by perusing his performance history, that Branagh and the Bard have quite the intimate relationship. In fact, Branagh’s role as Henry V in the movie he directed of the same name was what made me fall in love with him. Especially, though by no means limited to, his rendition of the well-known St. Crispin’s Day speech, which I memorized for a Speech class in high school after watching this video on repeat (half of the views are probably mine).

Branagh’s Henry V, for which he received Oscar nominations for best leading actor and best director, served as his first directing project for the Renaissance Theatre Company, which he formed with David Parfitt after leaving the Royal Shakespeare Company. He has gone on to direct seventeen films, including Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and As You Like It. NonShakespearean projects of Branagh’s that are recognizable include directing the first Marvel Thor movie, voice acting for Miguel in DreamWorks’s The Road to El Dorado, and making appearing as Professor Gilderoy Lockhart in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.

Recently Brannagh was being considered to replace Sir Nicholas Hynter as artistic director of the National Theatre in London, but the position will ultimately be going to Rufus Norris. While Branagh might not get to fulfill his “pathetic urge at some stage in [his] life to be able to pull out [his] wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say Kenneth Branagh, artistic director,” just yet, it’s comforting to me to know that he’ll still be free to keep making movies. Two of his current projects to look forward to include Jack Ryan, Shadow Recruit, which is in post-production, and Cinderella, which is still being filmed.

In describing working with Shakespearean material, Branagh says that: “it’s like going back to some great piece of music. It is dramatic poetry, so each time you hear it, it reacts on you in a different, usually a richer way. It’s like a wonderful dog that gives you much more than you’ll ever give it. There’s unconditional love in there; he never lets you down and he’s never sentimental; he’s always bracing because he’s so very, very realistic about families and love and all the normal human stuff.” This definitely came through in his performance last night as we witnessed Macbeth’s internal struggle with evil and ambition, paralleling his dramatic transformation from dutiful soldier to murderous usurper and ultimately to mad tyrant.

It remains my hope that Branagh continues to find inspiration in the Bard, and to bring these supremely human stories to life on both the stage and screen.

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John Manfredi’s role in An Iliad may claim him to be “the Poet”, but this play is a complex exercise in storytelling, and Manfredi is a master at the craft. In weaving the tale of the Trojan war, he also weaves an intensely layered web of emotions: grief, rage, bloodlust, and desperation. These build upon each other throughout the performance, wonderfully developing the narrator as a character, as well as steadily climbing to staggering climactic scenes. Though Manfredi is alone on the stage, one wouldn’t believe it by the end of the play, watching as he fills the set with motion, whipping the air into a maelstrom of words, feelings, and the ghosts of the fallen.

Helpful for those who haven’t read The Iliad, or slept through the lectures  for which they were supposed to have read The Iliad, is Manfredi’s friendly approach to the material. He eases the audience into the vast and tumultuous sea of unfamiliar names and characters, neglecting to name some as he argues it would take forever (and as anyone who’s ever read the works knows, it certainly feels like it does), and bringing the enormity of the armies home by naming American hometowns and cities in place of the ancient Greek locations. Later, Manfredi will pick his way through a battlefield that is resurrected in his mind, and demonstrates how they’re not just bodies by naming them, telling their stories, such as one who was going to go Oxford “first in his family to go to university…he’d won a scholarship for writing.”

It is here that the beauty of the piece comes through, for the purpose of this enactment of a tale known so well as to have lost all meaning, the tale of a wooden horse and a city foolish enough to bring it into their gates, is to plead with the audience to remember and to realize the implications that this story has on our modern day. The world is no less filled with strife and warfare as it was during the nine bloody years that the Greeks sieged Troy. We all know about the wooden horse, it’s a trope that’s been repeated endlessly, a particular favorite of mine is Sir Bedevere’s giant wooden rabbit in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Manfredi’s narrator is haunted by the horrors he witnessed in his time during the Trojan war, but also at the atrocities of war that have transpired since. He seems as though he has been cursed to bear witness to the cruel violence humans continue to commit against each other, while attempting to warn us through his tale but like Cassandra, the prophet of doom who was cursed to never be heard, his words fail to stop the fighting.

Thus, Manfredi’s approach is a direct appeal to the audience, he acknowledges and addresses us for we are the ones who have come to hear his tale, providing him with the chance to honor and bring to life once more, if only in his mind, the friends and good men who fought in those days. His tale is emphasized by his record player, which plays everything from Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” to the Forrest Gump soundtrack, though there are times when the Muses (or a faulty hand-cranked generator) cause the power to cut out. Several props and bouts of re-enactment move the story along as Manfredi dashes across the stage swinging a pipe to substitute Achilles’s spear. Manfredi’s story flows from Achilles to Hector to Patroclus, giving an intimate perspective of these incredible characters of myth, sweeping us up in the pain with which he recollects, for the focus on Manfredi allows us to examine the toll that war takes on the human mind and heart, even though Manfredi never discusses who he is or the role he specifically played in the battle. All we as the audience know is that he was there, that he knew the taste of blood, and that now he stands before us, broken and reaching out in desperation.

If you can, I recommend that you go, go to hear his tale and give an old soldier the audience and absolution he so dearly needs. Honestly, we all need it too.

Who: John Manfredi

What: One-Man Play

Where: 120 East Huron St.

When: September 26th through October 27th
(show times: Thursday 7:30pm, Friday-Saturday 8pm, Saturday 3pm, Sunday 2pm)

John Manfredi’s one-man reinterpretation of Homer’s “Iliad” takes the epic and hurls it into a time closer to our own, promising audiences an opportunity to reflect upon the original as well as explore its implications on war in the world today. Receiving four out of four stars by Detroit Free Press writer John Monaghan, I’m excited to see if Manfredi’s isolation on the stage will provide a hyper-focus into his character and the human mind that would not be as accessible with the distraction of multiple characters.