Lifetime Plans Horror Series Based on Shakespeare's Plays

Dominic Monaghan joins Shakespeare horror anthology series ‘A Midsummer’s Nightmare’

By Emily Rome  @EmilyNRome | Friday, Oct 7, 2016 6:09 PM

1 comments

“It will have blood. They say, blood will have blood.”
Things are about to get even bloodier than Shakespeare’s bloodiest revenge stories, and Dominic Monaghan is on board. The Lost and Lord of the Rings alum has signed on for a role in Lifetime’s horror anthology take on the Bard’s plays.

There’s certainly plenty in Shakespeare that lends itself to horror — Macbeth and Titus Andronicus come to mind — but Lifetime is turning to a comedy play for its first season: A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The anthology series itself is titled A Midsummer’s Nightmare.

Monaghan is playing the show’s version of Puck. The Brit best known for playing a mischievous hobbit seems like a solid fit for Robin Goodfellow. In this interpretation, Puck is “Mike Puck,” according to Deadline, “the laid-back and well-spoken proprietor of the Dreamland Retreat, a rustic group of rental cabins in the woods. Although initially suspicious of his young guests, Puck becomes a formidable ally when things start to go awry.”

Anthony Jaswinski, who wrote this summer’s The Shallows, is adapting Shakespeare’s Midsummer for the series. Along with the addition of Monaghan to the project, Jaswinski is joined today by Gary Fleder (Zoo, Kingdom), who will direct the pilot and executive produce the series.
Here’s how Lifetime described the series earlier this year:

An anthological concept where each season takes a classic Shakespearean tale and twists it into a modern-day horror-mystery. A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspires the first season as two young lovers escape their lives on a romantic getaway into the woods until their journey takes an unexpected twist when their friends arrive trying to lure them back home. Something hiding in the forest has other plans, however, and they are targeted one by one while a thrilling and desperate tale of survival unravels. 

Variety reported that the plays are turned into “contemporary horror mysteries,” so I’m assuming Lifetime will set the series in modern day with language not in verse. (Maybe they’ll find that earlier eras lend themselves to horror interpretations of some plays, though, just as American Horror Story has set each of its cycles in a different time and place.) So Monaghan won’t need any advice from his LotR buddy Billy Boyd about taking on the Bard’s verse, but perhaps he and Boyd will still find themselves comparing notes on Shakespeare sometime (Boyd played Banquo in a 2013 production of Macbeth at the Globe).

I’d like to see the inherent horror elements of The Scottish Play and Titus ramped up for this series. Caliban in The Tempest too could give us a striking horror fantasy. Hamlet is psychological thriller-ready. But I’m also intrigued by the possibilities of adding horror elements to other plays. Perhaps a Comedy of Errors where all the misunderstandings and mistaken identity make for gory tragedy instead of humorous reunions. Or an alternate take on The Merchant of Venice where Portia never makes it to court and we do see a pound of flesh cut from Antonio.

Interesting question here: Can a Midsummer’s Nightmare finale give us a happy ending? Will a comedy-based play still end in a wedding? Or will a final girl be the only one who makes it out of Dreamland Retreat? So long as the project gets a series order, I suppose we’ll find out once Midsummer’s Nightmare makes its debut on Lifetime.

Emily Rome

An enthusiast of time travel stories, film scores, avocados and Charades, Emily Rome is an alumna of Loyola Marymount University and a native of beautiful Washington State. Emily’s writing has also appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Entertainment Weekly and The Hollywood Reporter. Follow her on Twitter @EmilyNRome.

Canada's Top Novelist's Latest Book Retells "The Tempest" Through Prison Inmates' Stage Production

Margaret Atwood’s clever retelling a Shakespeare production put on by inmates

on October 2, 2016 - 12:01 AM

Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold
By Margaret Atwood
Hogarth
295 pages, $25

By Karen Brady

Margaret Atwood unleashes her wicked wit in the wonderfully named “Hag-Seed,” a cunning new novel bound to charm thespians everywhere – particularly those with ties to Ontario’s Stratford Festival.

For the Toronto-based Atwood – surely Canada’s best-known author – places this present-day retelling of Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” in what we can only assume are the environs of Stratford and London, Ont., using as her protagonist one Felix Phillips, artistic director of the fictional repertory theater, the Makeshiweg Festival.

Like Stratford, the Makeshiweg has “fluttering pennants,” an “outdoor patio and landscaped floral surroundings and festive ice cream-licking playgoers,” the main street of the town replete “with its pricey restaurants and its pubs ornamented with the heads of archaic poets and pigs and Renaissance queens … and its Celtic woollen-goods outlets and Inuit carving shops and English china boutiques, and then its handsome yellow brick houses with their occasional bed and breakfast signs…”

Alas. Felix will soon be banished from his beloved Makeshiweg – much as Shakespeare’s Prospero was ousted, centuries ago, from his position as the Duke of Milan, both removals the result of power grabs sending Prospero and Felix into exile.

Felix’s takes place at the hands of Tony, the festival’s glad-handing “factotum” (think Antonio, brother of Prospero), along with Canada’s grudge-holding heritage minister Sal O’Nally (counterpoint: Shakespeare’s Alonso, King of Naples).

Betrayal begets reprisal, of course, and Atwood is at her cleverest as her Felix plots his, first from his rural Ontario hideaway, then from the Fletcher County Correctional Institute where – using the nom de plume “Mr. Duke” – he takes a position teaching in the prison’s Literacy Through Literature program: His focus will be the plays of Shakespeare, and his students will not only read but will perform Shakespeare, something they do for several years while Felix bides his time.

He is a man transfixed on revenge: “He longed for it. He day-dreamed about it. Tony and Sal must suffer. His present woeful situation was their doing … What was Felix waiting for? He hardly knew … suppressed rage sustained him. That and his thirst for justice.”

It is a delicious conundrum – and Atwood’s contribution to the Hogarth Shakespeare series commemorating the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. Other authors taking part in the international publishing effort include such notables as Anne Tyler, Edward St. Aubyn, Jeanette Winterson, Howard Jacobson, Gillian Flynn, Tracey Chevalier and Jo Nesbo, each creating a fresh novel from a Shakespeare play. (Ian McEwan’s brilliant new “Nutshell,” an unrelated Doubleday title, is based on the work of the bard as well, taking its inspiration from “Hamlet.”)

“The Tempest” – known for island storms, the magic of Ariel and the moods of Caliban, son of the malevolent Sycorax – is the perfect vehicle for Atwood’s “Hag-Seed.” Exile is not an isle here but a hideout, a subterfuge, a prison – and Miranda, Felix’s cherished daughter, exists only onstage although her presence is sensed by Felix whenever it is dusk.

A triply tragic figure, he lost his wife – to complications following childbirth – three years before his dismissal from the Makeshiweg. And, mere months before that life-altering expulsion, he lost little Miranda as well, to meningitis. But the child stays with him, a spirit-presence who grows older, as the years go by.

“Miranda’s fifteen now, a lovely girl,” Felix muses. “All grown up from the cherub on the swing who’s still enclosed in her silver frame beside his bedside … If she’d lived, she would have been at the awkward teenager stage: making dismissive comments, rolling her eyes at him, dying her hair, tattooing her arms. Hanging out in bars, or worse. He’s heard the stories. But none of that has happened. She remains simple, she remains innocent. She’s such a comfort.”

With this exception, Atwood stays close to Shakespeare’s plot – and she does so in a double way when she has Felix prepare his inmate-students for the production of his life, the very version of “The Tempest” he was planning for the Makeshiweg when he was so unceremoniously stripped of his directorship.

Thus it is that Atwood creates not only a play-within-a-play but the same play within itself, centuries apart.

It is an exceptional move, marred only by Atwood’s tendency to treat the prison production as only a professor or director would – with long, agonizing analyses of the play, and equally long, agonizing indecision over which inmate would be best for the parts not only of Ariel and Caliban but also such lesser folk as Stephano or Gonzalo.

Ferdinand one can understand for he, the prince of Naples, will be Miranda’s love interest – and Felix is fiercely protective not only of his own Miranda but also of Anne-Marie Greenland, the actress who was to play Miranda in the aborted Makeshiweg production 12 years before and who has graciously agreed to come to the prison to fulfill that dream.

Consenting to do this, she shakes Felix’s hand: “She had a grip like a jar-opener,” he notes. “Chastity won’t be the only reason his Prospero will be warning the Ferdinand lad to keep away from this girl: Ferdinand wouldn’t want to be a pre-mangled bridegroom.”

There is much hilarity here – especially within the prison walls where “Mr. Duke” has become a fixture, and inmates vie for spots in his classes. They all have monikers of their own -- Leggs, PPod, Bent Pencil, Wonderboy, 8Handz et al. – and personalities to match. For the duration, they have pledged to use only swear words from the production – “hag-seed” and “whoreson,” both referring to Caliban, and other words of the same ilk.

“Power struggles, treacheries, crimes,” Felix reflects, “these subjects were immediately grasped by his students since in their own ways they were experts in them.”

Felix himself will play Prospero and, crème de la crème, two Canadian ministers will pay a visit to the prison, to view the latest product of the Literacy Through Literature program – those dignitaries being Sal and, of course, Tony, now a minister too. Felix plans to subject them to a tempest of his own – one as makeshift as the prison costumes and sets but, with the aid of electronics, a very frightening tempest indeed.

“If his magic holds and his play is successful, he’ll get his heart’s desire,” he considers. “But if he fails…”

“Trust the play,” he decides. “But is the play trustworthy?”

Atwood plies her witchcraft in several directions here – and one can only guess at how many names and situations are in-jokes (a longtime practice of hers), adding more levels to an already-layered book. Local readers will pick up on her reference to “the Timmys doughnut chain” being responsible for one inmate’s sobriquet, “TimEEz.”

Fletcher, the prison, is fictional – but Atwood makes mention of a justice course once being taught there by the University of Western Ontario – which is in London, fewer than 40 miles from Stratford. As for the hallowed Stratford Festival being the inspiration for Felix – Atwood includes, among her acknowledgments, the fact that “Felix Phillips borrowed his last name from the late Robin Phillips, longtime theatre director at the Stratford Festival in Ontario, Canada.”

In sum and in almost every way, Atwood’s latest offering is – in the words of Fletcher inmate Leggs – “whoreson fantastic!”