ABSTRACT
In Next, a short animated film made by Barry Purves in 1989 for the Aardman company, a theatre director is sat in the stalls when William Shakespeare himself comes on to audition. In a mimed routine of increasing virtuosity and frenetic activity, using a life-size doll and a variety of props, Shakespeare alludes briefly, at times clearly and at others opaquely, towards his entire corpus of plays, ending as Jupiter in Cymbeline in an apotheosis of his glory. The theatre director, initially bored, too engrossed in reading a copy of Peter Hall’s Diaries even to look at the stage, becomes transfigured, not only attentive but also suddenly haloed, finally seen with angel’s wings, and given, as he guffaws with laughter, the film’s only words other than its opening call of ‘Next!’: ‘Lord, what fools these mortals be!’ (A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act III, Scene 2, line 115). The theatre director is not only reading a book by Peter Hall; unmistakably he looks like Peter Hall, probably the only theatre director whose face might be recognised by the audience for an animated short. By the end, Hall becomes both St Peter to the divine Shakespeare and Puck to Shakespeare’s Oberon. Peter Hall, the film suggests, has been given a special position in the world of Shakespeare production, a figure uniquely allowed access to Shakespeare himself, the favoured disciple of the master, the rock on whom the church of Shakespeare has been founded.
