Blogging Shakespeare

At the 14th annual Bharat Rang Mahotsav theatre festival in New Delhi, India, audiences had the choice of performances by companies from all over the world. Way ahead of the U.K.’s World Shakespeare Festival, this year’s BRM included, among its 93 productions in 27 languages, a Kannada-language version of Hamlet (from Karnataka in southwest India); [...]

Having just reviewed The Tempest for YearofShakespeare.com, I thought you might like to hear some of my responses to the R.S.C.’s production of Twelfth Night, or What You Will. The recording was made just a few moments after I’d seen it. Just click on the audio-post below. listen to ‘Twelfth Night WSF’ on Audioboo

There are the plays everybody knows and loves: the big four tragedies, the cross-dressing comedies, the Henry IVs, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra. There are the plays we may feel we have to pretend we know, even if we don’t: Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, The Winter’s Tale, and [...]

As Elizabeth Schafer reminds us in the Shakespeare in Production edition of the play, ‘The Taming of the Shrew has been phenomenally popular outside English-speaking countries’. Sweden is no exception in this respect; The Taming of the Shrew has been one of the five most popular Shakespeare plays in this country for well over a [...]

It’s the festival season. I happened to see my friend Peter Kyle the other day. As well as being Chairman of The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (and former C.E.O. of Shakespeare’s Globe), he’s Director General of The English-Speaking Union which has one of the loveliest HQ of any I know: Dartmouth House, just off Berkley Square [...]

This post is part of Year of Shakespeare, a project documenting the World Shakespeare Festival, the greatest celebration of Shakespeare the world has ever seen.   The Tempest, The Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by David Farr, 20 April 2012 at The Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon By Paul Edmondson For a while I was worried that [...]

2012 in the United Kingdom is a big year for a lot of reasons – the London Summer Olympics and the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee happen this year, both of which are attracting lots of media attention. What you might not know yet is that 2012 is also a big year for Shakespeare, both in the [...]

I recently had the pleasure of working as an advisor for a production of Henry VI Part Three by the Lit Moon Theatre Company, directed by John Blondell, in Santa Barbara, California. This production partly represented a run-up for Blondell with his home company in preparation for the production he will direct with the Bitola [...]

To Bristol last Saturday to see Andrew Hilton’s latest offering for Shakespeare at The Tobacco Factory: King Lear with John Shrapnel in the title role. Hilton’s Shakespeare productions tell the story with great clarity, strong characterisation, and a crisp, authoritative, non-laboured delivery of the language. This makes a visit to a production at Shakespeare at [...]