Updating the play, as Teevan does, also presents problems.
Playwright Peter Morgan is reportedly considering updating the play to include Tony Blair.
I was reminded of how Katie Mitchell's production of The Seagull at the National Theatre last year tried to update the play to the 1930s with unfortunate results.
It time-hops between 1958 and the present – with Kaye Campbell set to update the play for added currency – to examine society's shifting attitudes to homosexuality.
Updating the play in this manner has a weighty resonance, too – Shakespeare's kingly tyrants are hauntingly mirrored by modern-day presidents.
"This is Shakespeare filtered through Beckett and Brecht," Caryn James wrote in The New York Times, "but it's far from a slick attempt to update the play.
By the end of the ride, Mr. Valdez had agreed to a full-blown revision of the script that would update the play and incorporate elements of the movie.
As before it takes an entire Spanish village to kill a corrupt ruler; as before each and every villager responds to the subsequent inquiry with "Fuenteovejuna did it!" But the director, Julián J. Mesri, has updated the play (based on an actual incident) and set it in a modern-day office.
Called Coriolan/us, their version is, says Pearson, an "infusion" of Shakespeare's study of political and military might with Bertolt Brecht's Coriolan, his unfinished, heavily leftwing attempt to update the play; translated excerpts will be layered with Shakespeare's script.
Actually, it all emerged from our reading the text and saying, 'Good lord, isn't this exactly analagous to what happened under Hitler, Stalin and so on?' " A firm plan to update the play gradually emerged, followed by two other key decisions.
