Antony and Cleopatra, Directed by John Blondell, at the Bitola Shakespeare Festival, Macedonia, 22-28 July 2015 Reviewed by Randall Martin The annual Bitola Shakespeare Festival, now in its third year, opened with a visually evocative and powerfully moving Antony and Cleopatra in Macedonian by the National Theatre Bitola, directed by John Blondell of the Lit Moon Theatre […]
The Tempest Lit Moon Theatre Company, Santa Barbara, USA Director: John Blondell Review by Randall Martin The gritty basement storage area of the Bitola National Theatre looked like a good space for some rough magic. Floor-to-ceiling v-shaped support-beams, with hanging knotted ropes and swinging poles, suggested the deck of a ship or a New World […]
ROMEO AND JULIET Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theatre, St Petersburg, Russia National Theatre Bitola, Macedonia Director Dejan Projkovski Review by Randall Martin This was a bilingual Macedonian and Russian production of Romeo and Juliet performed by the Vera Komissarzhevskaya Theatre, St Petersburg and the National Theatre Bitola. The 850-seat theatre – the largest of the National Theatre’s […]
Henry VI Part Three National Theatre Bitola, Macedonia Director: John Blondell Review by Randall Martin What does it feel like to watch Shakespeare’s darkest story of civil war in a region whose past and recent history has been written by endemic conflict? Bitola’s Henry VI Part Three gave an affective answer. When I saw this […]
National Theatre of China, Beijing Director: Wang Xiaoying The expectant audience for the Bitola Festival’s Richard III had been brought up to speed by Henry VI Parts One and Three earlier in the week (the scheduled production of Part Two from Tirana was unable to come at the last moment). But even if they hadn’t […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
