Blogging Shakespeare

On Monday this week, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust hosted a webinar, ‘Reviewing Shakespeare’, an in-depth discussion I had with Dr Paul Prescott (University of Warwick) about how and why we review Shakespearian productions. What makes a good theatre review? Do we dare to ‘speak what we feel not what we ought to say’? (King Lear, [...]

Why should we review theatre? What makes a good theatre review? Do we dare to speak the truth about what we see? Join us for a free webinar on ‘Reviewing Shakespeare’ sponsored by Bloomsbury Publishing. It’s on Monday 6 May at 4.00pm (British Summer Time) and you can register for it by clicking here. Last [...]

Last spring we launched A Year of Shakespeare – an energetic record and review of all 73 productions which took place in the World Shakespeare Festival. Today, those reviews, by 30 international contributors, are published as A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival. It’s well illustrated and represents another innovation from Bloomsbury publishing [...]

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.   Pericles, Directed by James Farrell and Jamie Rocha-Allan for the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Courtyard Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 5 October 2012. By José A. Pérez Díez Arguably, the main difference between [...]

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.   A Tender Thing, directed by Helena Kaut-Howson and written by Ben Power for the RSC at the Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon By Pete Kirwan     Unlike the Olympics, the World Shakespeare [...]

Heavens to betsy! No sooner do I announce that I’m going to write a series of posts on Shakespeare’s neglected plays, starting with the Henry VI trilogy, than these three plays get more attention than they have in decades. First, the Balkan productions at the World Shakespeare Festival were hits, sometimes revelatory (click for reviews [...]

Can you guess who said the following about Henry VI Part One? ‘All critics, all readers, will probably agree or have agreed that it is one of the least poetical and also one of the dullest of all the plays in the Folio. It is redeemed by few passages of merit—its verse is unmusical, its [...]

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.   On 13 September twenty-five academics, theatre practitioners, educators, and students gathered in Stratford-upon-Avon at the Shakespeare Institute to discuss the World Shakespeare Festival and the summer of Shakespeare to which [...]

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.   King Lear, directed by Michael Attenborough for the Almeida Theatre, 22 September 2012 By Sonia Massia, King’s College London Having sat through the first few minutes of Attenborough’s production of [...]