La figure du showrunner shakespearien comme imposteur : Shakespeare, Branagh, Lindelof, Welles
Résumé
This article examines the Shakespearean showrunner as imposter, taking us from Shakespeare’s theatre to Damon Lindelof’s television series, via the cinema of Orson Welles. In the case of the Elizabethan playwright William Shakespeare, a non-aristocrat and the son of a provincial glove-maker: through class prejudices, the author’s identity disappointed those who could not imagine that such extraordinary plays could have been written by a man of the people. When Kenneth Branagh, from a working-class background in Northern Ireland, dared to adapt Shakespeare’s plays for the screen in the late 1980s, the press asked if he could measure up to the actor-director Laurence Olivier. A few years later, the debate was reversed: Branagh had made a name for himself as a Shakespearean director, and disappointed those who did not expect to see him tackle Hollywood genre films. By invoking the themes and motifs of Shakespeare’s late romances in the series LOST (ABC, 2004-2010), showrunner Damon Lindelof ended up disappointing a large part of the public: LOST was seen as a deceptive work, with no pre-plan. In the end, we might ask ourselves whether the Shakespearean showrunner who handled the critical pressure best wasn’t Orson Welles. With his filmic essay F for Fake (1973), he acknowledged the imposture that is part and parcel of every artist and every art form, as soon as there is an art market.
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