There is, in the annals of Shakespearean publishing history, the figure of a young typesetter who started out as a lowly apprentice but rose, stratospherically, to set manuscripts of the Bard’s biggest tragedies.
John Leason (Tré Medley) set Shakespeare’s first folio in 1623 at Jaggard’s printers. We follow him from his tremulous first day (“Who is Shakespeare?” he asks) to the powerful, questioning, figure he becomes.
Under the direction of Marie McCarthy, Charlie Dupré’s Bruntwood prize longlisted play is fittingly staged on the 400th anniversary of the first folio and asks thoughtful questions of the editing process and the cost of Shakespeare’s transformation into the nation’s playwright under the reign of King James. But it is stalled by discussion over drama, with too many ideas on editorial shaping (and re-shaping) spelled out to us.
We follow the 17-year-old as he helps to transpose Shakespeare’s handwritten texts into print. “It just goes in through your eyes and out through your fingers,” Isaac Jaggard (Kaffe Keating) instructs him. “Try not to participate,” his senior, Richard Bardolph (David Monteith), adds when John begins disputing words and meanings.
His central contention is in the description of Macbeth’s witches. Originally, they were “wondrously weird”, we learn, but they have, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, become wicked hags because “King James likes his witches wayward”, Bardolph says.
In an opaque and unconvincing plot turn, John begins seeing his late mother (also deemed wayward) mirrored in the lexical transformation, and stages an intellectual rebellion, of sorts. This feels overplayed, while John’s change from novice to a would-be literary critic and rebel seems abrupt and forced by plot rather than character.
Performances are heartfelt but do not bring nuance or emotional depth. There is an attempt to infuse the play’s themes with human drama between characters but there is not enough meat there, and it remains a static play whose pace lags.
There are fascinating ideas underpinning it nonetheless; Jaggard tells John he can drop or add words into Shakespeare’s texts in order to adhere to the rules of printing. This functional editing is a shocking, even sacrilegious notion. Sophia Pardon’s set design captures the inky, subterranean feel of a 17th-century printer while Rachel Sampley’s lighting and video design (gothic silhouettes, bolts of darkness) bring visual melodrama. But sadly, these elements do not bring the injection of intrigue that this play badly needs.
• Compositor E is at the Omnibus Theatre, London until 7 October.
