Othello, Shakespeare Company of Japan and Pirikap, dir. Kazumi Shimodate and Debo Akibe. Tara Arts, London. 7 August 2019 By Sarah Olive It’s a popular fallacy in Japan that it is difficult to produce Othello because the country is too culturally homogenous: fallacious because, in Japan, there are several marginalised indigenous populations plus zainichi Koreans […]
Play On directed by Robert Hollingworth and Omar Shahryar, Jack Lyons Concert Hall, University of York, UK, 1 November 2017 Review by Sarah Olive, University of York The undergraduate students of York’s music department had only six weeks to work with their directors – Robert Hollingworth and Omar Shahryar – devising and developing their practical […]
Twelfth Night, Watermill, dir. Paul Hart, York Theatre Royal. 19 May 2017. Reviewed by Sarah Olive This production was one of two offerings from Watermill Theatre at the second York International Shakespeare Festival (Romeo and Juliet was the other). Both traded heavily on the incorporation of live music into the productions: Romeo and Juliet with […]
Pericles, Yohangza, dir. Yang Jung-ung, TJ Towol theatre, Seoul Arts Centre, Korea. 23 November 2016, 3pm matinee. Reviewed by Sarah Olive I recently attended the Asian Shakespeare Association conference in Dehli, where the disoriented spectator was having a field day: the concept from theatre criticism, that is, rather than a person (though […]
Love’s Labour’s Won [Much Ado About Nothing]: RSC Education Schools Broadcast Royal Shakespeare Company Dir. Christopher Luscombe Royal Shakespeare Theatre/Ravensbourne University 30 April 2015 Much Ado About Nothing, here renamed Love’s Labour’s Won to fit with the RSC’s other offerings during Winter 2014-15, is a play about two people who refuse to countenance that […]
Antony and Cleopatra, a rehearsed reading of Dir. George Costigan York Theatre Royal, York 22 February 2015 My relationship with Antony and Cleopatra is as unstable as its protagonists’. Seeing Elizabeth Taylor’s depiction of the Egyptian queen as a six year-old led to a juvenile obsession with bath salts in order to recreate her […]
Two Gentlemen of Verona, Royal Shakespeare Company, dir. Simon Godwin, RSC Schools, 20 November 2014. Reviewed by Sarah Olive, University of York Yesterday, I watched Two Gentlemen of Verona in a seminar room in the University of York’s Law and Management Building with colleagues and students from Santiago, Shanghai and Montana. Perhaps surprisingly, this wasn’t in the […]
A Winter’s Tale Common Ground Touring Theatre, dir. by Hannah Davies and Tom Cornford, Friargate Theatre, York, 11 March 2014. Review by Sarah Olive I had spent the day of this performance writing about oral history interviews on Shakespearean theatre as a ‘people’s critique’ worthy of sustained, scholarly attention in performance history. Then two of my department’s PhD […]
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 12 June twenty-five academics, theatre practitioners, digital curators, and museums specialists gathered in London to discuss the Globe to Globe and World Shakespeare Festivals so far. We live tweeted […]
