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The Winter’s Tale (Renegade Theatre) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (via Globe Player)

The Winter’s Tale is structured, at roughly its mid-point, around a passage of time. It’s a play whose passage of sixteen years allows for an evocation of long regret and mourning, of aging and changing, of memory and forgiveness (or not). But in Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn, performed at the Globe as part of the 2012 Globe to …

Hamlet (Yohangza Theatre) @ The Peacock Theatre, London

A raised platform thrust upwards from a bed of fine gravel, while towering tapestries on three sides of the stage depicted ancient Korean men and women in formal postures and brightly coloured clothes. Onto this stage stepped a man in black, reading a Penguin edition of Hamlet, who began speaking words whose cadences, even if …

A Year of Shakespeare, eds. Paul Edmondson, Paul Prescott & Erin Sullivan

A Year of Shakespeare: Re-living the World Shakespeare Festival is now out at a good Shakespeare-related bookshop near you, and as Shakespeare’s Globe welcomes back some of the standout productions from last year’s World Shakespeare Festival, it seems timely to flag up the volume that offers an overview of all seventy-four productions, events and films …

The Merchant of Venice (Habima) @ Shakespeare’s Globe. Part 2: The Production

Follow-up to The Merchant of Venice (Habima) @ Shakespeare’s Globe. Part 1: Outer Frame from The Bardathon It’s impossible to divorce context from production. Immediately after Dromgoole left the stage, still being applauded for his pre-emptive shutting down of protests, the actors of Habima emerged onto the Globe stage and called for a welcome, whipping …

The Merchant of Venice (Habima) @ Shakespeare’s Globe. Part 1: Outer Frame

Reviewing an event such as this evening’s performance at the Globe of The Merchant of Venice by Habima (Israel’s national theatre) poses serious ethical questions. If the review focuses on the entire experience – the preliminaries, the tensions, the various kinds of performance taking place both outside and within the auditorium – then the production …

The Taming of the Shrew (Theatre Wallay) @ Shakespeare’s Globe

"This is a sacred space" announced Salman Shahid, introducing Theatre Wallay’s Globe to Globe production of The Taming of the Shrew. For the first time that I’ve seen in a Globe to Globe production, a member of the company came onto the stage to introduce the play and the company’s honour at being here, before …

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (Two Gents Productions) @ Lakeside Arts Centre

Follow-up to Two Gentlemen of Verona; or, Vakomana Vaviri ve Zimbabwe (Two Gents Productions) @ North Wall Oxford from The Bardathon It’s been two and a half years since I last saw Two Gents Productions perform their debut show, and a lot has changed in the meantime. I won’t offer a full fresh review here …

All’s Well that Ends Well (Arpana) @ Shakespeare’s Globe

It is not unusual to note that, when adapting classical English texts that particularly deal with class systems and social hierarchies, from Shakespeare to Austen, the Indian caste system lends itself particularly well to direct translation. In Sunil Shanbab’s Globe to Globe production of All’s Well that Ends Well, the transgressive nature of Heli’s (Mansi …

U–Venas no Adonisi (Venus and Adonis) (Isango Ensemble) @ Shakespeare’s Globe

Writing about web page http://www.isangoensemble.org/#!future-productions The tagline for the ‘Globe to Globe’ Festival reads “37 Plays, 37 Languages”; a tagline which excludes the Isango Ensemble’s U-Venas no Adonisi, the thirty-eighth ‘play’ (a dramatised version of Shakespeare’s poem) spoken in not one but six different languages: IsiZulu, IsiXhosa, SeSotho, Setswana, Afrikaans and South African English. This …

The Next Complete Works

Shakespeare’s Globe have just announced their exciting 2012 project -a new Complete Works of Shakespeare. This will see the Globe present 38 plays (don’t get me started on the absence of Edward III and Thomas More!) over six months, each one in a different language. The Bardathon was founded in the spirit of ‘event Shakespeare’, based on the …