Blogging Shakespeare

BITOLA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL Henry VI Part One National Theatre Belgrade, Serbia Director: Nikita Milivojevič   I had the pleasure of seeing and writing about Nikita Milivojevič’s brilliant adaptation of Henry VI Part One at last year’s Globe to Globe in London. Watching it again at the Bitola Shakespeare Festival was just as enthralling but also […]

The Globe x 3: The Tempest, The Taming of the Shrew, and Macbeth, June 2013   From zero to three in ten days. What can I say? To see one Shakespeare play at the Globe in London was the main reason for this trip.  We saw three.   THE TEMPEST Directed      by: Jeremy Herrin […]

BITOLA SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL 2013 Created by Nina Sallinen and Katja Krohn Performed by Nina Sallinen The audience was waiting to get into the basement playing space of the National Theatre. Behind the door an old woman’s voice screamed “Go away!” The door opened. “Oh, welcome my friends!” The 90-year old Nina Sallinen appeared in faded […]

The 60th Stratford-upon-Avon Poetry Festival is in full swing. Following on from last year, The Shakespeare Birthplace Trust is hosting its second Writer in Residence, the great Wendy Cope. She is surely one of the most popular poets of her generation. Her poems, often funny on the surface, ring concisely true with modern concerns and […]

It wasn’t what I expected, which was lectures by some British Shakespeare enthusiasts, scholarly analysis of Shakespeare’s most difficult play The Taming of the Shrew, and heated discussions of how to interpret Katherine’s last monologue. Sadly, there were no British participants at all but the gentleman running the course, the chairperson of the Swedish Shakespeare […]

On 11 July 2013 we hosted the showcase evening for a project we have been running since the autumn of 2012. 60 young people from 13 to 16  years old came to show off the poetry they had created re-telling Shakespeare’s tales in their own words. The “Shakespeare in Our Own Words” project was made […]

The Two Gentlemen of Verona is Shakespeare’s bromance. Gentlemen only in the sense that they don’t have to work for a living, Valentine and Proteus are buddies no mere woman can separate. It’s unquestionably very early Shakespeare—a “laboratory,” as the Oxford Shakespeare editors put it, for a plethora of ideas used more successfully in later […]

Bitola, Macedonia, 19-25 July 2013   The Bitola Shakespeare Festival is extending the bold intercultural experiment of last year’s Globe-to-Globe Festival in London. As part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, Globe-to-Globe launched a planetary Shakespeare project by inviting 37 companies from around the world to perform the playwright’s works in their home languages. The Bitola […]

While the works of William Shakespeare have shaped nearly all facets of modern culture today, his influence is keenly felt in the popular music scene.  Marjorie Garber, an English professor at Harvard University, writes in her book Shakespeare and Modern Culture (Pantheon Books, 2008), “Shakespeare makes modern culture and modern culture makes Shakespeare”. In 1949, the first VW Beetle arrived in […]

This isn’t the first time we’ve been to the Globe. That was in April 2008, a week or so before the theater opened for the season (bad timing).  Then we walked around outside, oohed and aahed, bought some DVDs and other things in the shop and hoped we’d get back one day. This was at […]