Shakespeare's plays have spawned a strangely uneven subculture. Tom Sutcliffe analyses opera based on the canon, and Michael Coveney looks at theatre inspired by the Bard

Opera

The news that Thomas Ades and the Royal Opera House have won an Olivier award for outstanding achievement in opera for The Tempest might suggest it was rather canny to use Shakespeare as a source. Verdi's Otello, Macbeth and Falstaff, Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream and even Berlioz's Beatrice et Benedict (based on Much Ado About Nothing) are all more or less successes. But the truth about Shakespearean operas is how few of them actually make the grade. Britten's Dream was the only really liked and workable Shakespeare opera in English until this new Tempest. When it was published in 1992, the New Grove Dictionary of Opera, the bible on such matters, tracked down about 270 operas based on Shakespeare's plays. Yet the failure rate is colossal.

In addition to those already mentioned, the repertoire includes Falstaff operas by Vaughan Williams and Karl Otto Nicolai, Purcell's Fairy Queen (essentially a sequence of masques added to a bowdlerised Dream), Rossini's Otello, Macbeth in French by Ernest Bloch and Aribert Reimann's German Lear. If Ades's Tempest becomes a fixture, it will be a case of 58th time lucky. More operas have been based on The Tempest than any other Shakespeare play.

One might think it offers a leg-up. Yet the composer should be warned that a leg-up on Shakespeare is a bit like an amateur rider mounting a steeplechaser. You are travelling dangerously and more than likely to get thrown at the first fence. Shakespeare knew all about the uses of music in theatre, but The Tempest, A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night set traps for the unwary.

There are two reasons. The music already in Shakespeare's poetry and prose poses a huge challenge for composers. And the iambic pen-tameter is, in musical terms, ungainly; compared with most song, it seems to have a foot in the wrong place. Britten's Dream bene-fits because the rude mechanicals speak prose, the fairies' poetry is usually in quatrains and simple rhymes, and any grand speech is often sent up as pompous. Britten's real achievement, however, was to create a distinctive musical world that matched but was not overawed by Shakespeare's genius.

For non-English-speaking opera composers, it is Shakespeare's drama that matters, more than his poetry. It was wise, liberating and courageous of Ades to procure a new text for The Tempest some distance from the original. Would Giorgio Battistelli, whose Richard III in English was recently premiered in Antwerp by the Flanders Opera, have evened up the odds by setting a Flemish or Italian translation that might well have been a less faithful adaptation of the original?

This Shakespeare play revolves around a peach of a role that has served a long line of stars brilliantly. Its trick - the delight-ful contrast between truth and fiction - is the way the Duke of Gloucester (later King Richard) lets us all in on his secret. We relish how he toys with other characters while pursuing his devilish plan. But Battistelli and his librettist, Ian Burton, have not recognised how unsuited music usually is to dissimulation. Music is definitively sincere. We tend to believe what we hear. So the play is reduced to Tarantino without the jokes and, in Robert Carsen's staging, without much gore either.

Battistelli's word-setting is mostly a kind of recitative that too mechanically follows the ti-tum-ti-tum rhythms of the poetry. Yet his orchestral effects are highly inventive responding to far more than the implicit ferocity of Richard's murderous plans. Battistelli is a magpie composer, more interested in sounds than in song, and his inventiveness is more decorative than dramatic. Instead of following Shakespeare by launching the opera with Richard's wicked confessional soliloquy ("Now is the winter of our discontent . . ."), he begins with coronation pageantry. Where Shakespeare's play presents dangerous intrigue against a quasi-normal backdrop, the opera, staged in half a circus ring of sand, is unrelentingly hysterical and tyrannical. Shakespeare made Richard a charming monster: Battistelli has endowed him only with bilious energy.

Since the Second World War, 187 Shakespeare operas have been composed - rather a lot, considering how few postwar operas have found a public. Ades's Tempest showed what can be achieved when a Shakespeare opera creates a world that can hold its own in musical terms alongside the playwright's meaningful but mysterious drama. The secret is musical invention and theatrical shaping.

Shakespeare and opera are awkward bedfellows. But as Verdi, Britten and perhaps now Ades show, when they work in tandem, they can be unbeatable.

Theatre

To a rousing rap chorus of "wee Willy Shaggers of Stratford town", the Bard of Avon made his latest live "in person" appearance on the contemporary British stage in Halifax at the end of last month. He was covered in red paint, and fuming. "I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you," he yelled at an inn full of boozers in Alan Plater's jolly new play Sweet William, pinching a line from Malvolio to hit back at accusations of stealing his friends' characters for dramatic purposes. The joke is that Twelfth Night and Malvolio have yet to exist. The pub play is set in 1599 (but not all that rigidly) and Fat Jack (played in the riotous Northern Broadsides touring production by the actor/director Barrie Rutter) has just snuffed it off-stage in his "stolen" alter ego of Jack Falstaff in the premiere of Henry V.

Shakespeare not only dominates and defines British drama; he seeps daily into its contemporary manifestation, sometimes as a direct presence, more often as a challenge, a standard or a provocation.

Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966) was a witty journey around Hamlet in the company of two minor characters that most critics have attributed to the influence of Samuel Beckett. But Stoppard was also following in the footsteps of other European surrealist masters such as Alfred Jarry and Eugene Ionesco, who both made merry with Macbeth. Jarry's Ubu Roi (1896), possibly the most important play in the modern theatre, started out as a parody of Macbeth and grew into a terrifying and hilarious assault on the brutality of the lumpen political bourgeoisie.

As John Gross's wonderful anthology After Shakespeare (2002) makes clear, there is hardly a single major writer, let alone playwright, who has not felt the Bard's breath down his back, from Schiller and Pushkin to Hugo and Ibsen.

And then there is Brecht. The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (written in 1941 and first performed in 1958) is, like Ubu Roi, a template for the modern Shakespearean drama, a brilliant epic satire of Hitler's Third Reich in the Chicago greengrocery trade, with Shakespearean scene endings and the "Friends, Romans, countrymen" speech imported into the oratorical education of a fascist. Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children (written 1939) and Life of Galileo (written 1938-39) were similarly Shakespearean, with clear ante-cedents in the history plays, while his translation of Coriolanus (first produced posthumously, in 1962) was a sly debunking of the tragic hero and a Marxist paean to the mob without mob rule.

What is Shakespearean in Brecht is always the best of him, and the same is true of Brecht's most obvious disciple in the British theatre, Edward Bond. His mighty Lear (written 1971), a revived version of which opens at the Sheffield Crucible on 9 March, is both a rewrite of Shakespeare and a Brechtian rethink of the principles of political power and responsibility.

It was in the same radical spirit that Arnold Wesker rewrote The Merchant of Venice as The Merchant (1976), partly in response to Laurence Olivier's Shylock in a 1970 production by Jonathan Miller that he felt (wrongly, in my view) to be grossly anti-Semitic. Wesker converted Shylock into a dispenser of enlightened intellectualism at the centre of an undercover refugee operation. His business interests were a means of maintaining a tradition of humane Judaism in a philistine society. In other words, he reclaimed the character from its own author. And it was Antonio, the merchant, who insisted on his pound of flesh, not Shylock, after his ships ran aground.

The Plater tactic of calling Shakespeare himself to task in assessing his contribution has many precedents, the roughest being Bond's Bingo (1973), in which the suicidal playwright was portrayed as a powerless artist condoning the brutal land enclosures. As the critic Ronald Bryden remarked, he could survive only by killing in himself the humane Shakespeare of the plays. But in writing about Shakespeare the man, Bond, no less than Plater, wrote in a Shakespearean manner. Where Bond was polemical and elegiac, Plater is rambunctious and hard-nosed.

However, perhaps the best modern "Shakespeare" play is Peter Whelan's The Herbal Bed (1996), in which Shakespeare's daughter, Susannah, sues for slander. Based on actual events, Whelan's writing is imbued with a Shakespearean sexiness and generosity, and the Bard himself is just about to appear . . . when the play ends.

Just how closely the plays reappear in other shapes was most recently demonstrated by Charlotte Jones's Humble Boy (2001), a beautiful reworking of Hamlet in a contemporary summer garden where Felix Humble, a bereaved university research fellow, considers bees and flowers and the supernatural theory of universal matter. Simon Russell Beale played the unhappy Felix, just a year after he had played Hamlet, and his National Theatre Ophelia, Cathryn Bradshaw, re-emerged in the new play as his former girlfriend.

This is one way of acknowledging the Shakespeare factor in all modern drama. Another is to join in the Act II chorus of Plater's Sweet William in the Eastcheap tavern with "a big stick of rhubarb up your bum".

Northern Broadsides is touring with Sweet William and The Comedy of Errors until June, taking in Guildford, Bury St Edmunds, Newcastle under Lyme, Leeds, Liverpool, Buxton, Salford, London, Richmond, Glasgow, Isle of Man, Ollerton, Portsmouth and Scarborough. For details, visit www.northern-broadsides.co.uk

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