Henry V (Edward’s Boys) @ The Swan, Stratford-upon-Avon
March 18, 2013
When I first saw Edward’s Boys, they were a group of mostly eleven year olds performing extracts of John Lyly’s Endymion in a campus drama studio. Last night, the same company (indeed, with many of the same actors) filled the Swan Theatre to bursting with an audience including knights of the realm, RSC actors and …
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Custom/Practice) @ Nottingham Playhouse
March 1, 2013
Rae McKen’s new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream opened with a framing device that left no doubt as to the production’s intended audience. Set in a modern detention room, a group of assorted school stereotypes assembled, bickering over mobile phones and classroom politics. After a short while, their velvet-jacketed teacher ‘Mr Goodfellow’ entered the …
The Knight of the Burning Pestle (Read not Dead) @ Sackler Studios, Shakespeare’s Globe
February 20, 2013
‘Post-modern before the term was even invented’. So runs the blurb on Shakespeare’s Globe’s ‘Read not Dead‘ webpage, and it’s a fitting description of Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. A failure when first performed, and an often difficult play in modern revival, the Read not Dead team here excelled themselves with an …
Fair Em (Steam Industry) @ The Union Theatre
February 5, 2013
Long-time readers will know that my scholarly research is based primarily on the group of anonymous or misattributed plays best known collectively as ‘The Shakespeare Apocrypha’, of which Fair Em is perhaps the most obscure, to scholars as well as theatregoers. Seemingly one never to shy away from a challenge, director Phil Willmott continued his run of …
Candlemas Revels at Middle Temple Hall
February 4, 2013
As part of a quite wonderful conference this weekend, I went to Candlemas Revels at Middle Temple Hall on Saturday night. The preceding two-day conference, convened by Jackie Watson and Darren Royston, focused on the Elizabethan and Jacobean context of the Inns of Court in relation to the legal and social culture of early modern …
Julius Caesar (RSC) on DVD
January 27, 2013
The acclaimed Julius Caesar directed by Gregory Doran for the RSC has already been discussed on this blog, but now, happily, the production has been released on DVD. Julius Caesar represents the exciting next phase in the RSC’s work with Illuminations, the production company that has already brought Greg’s Macbeth and Hamlet to DVD. For this …
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare Aloud!) @ The Shakespeare Centre, Stratford
January 6, 2013
Shakespeare Aloud! is the in-house acting team at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, offering what they refer to as a ‘jukebox Shakespeare’ for tourists, where bitesize segments, songs, speeches are delivered on demand to the visitors at the houses. It offers added value for visitors and seems to fit in with the casual engagement with Shakespeare …
Shakespeare and the Making of Theatre
January 3, 2013
The blog has been quiet for a while, which is the unfortunate result of a dearth of new early modern theatre in the East Midlands and a very busy December at work. Coming up later in 2013 will be reviews of new shows by Propeller, the RSC, Shakespeare’s Globe, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory and …
Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince)
November 27, 2012
This post is a prelude to a full review of Pascale Aebischer and Kathryn Prince’s new edited collection, Performing Early Modern Drama Today (Cambridge, 2012), which is forthcoming in a future issue of Cahiers Elisabethains. I trump the book on this blog because it is, I will be arguing, one of the most important collections …
The Changeling @ The Young Vic
November 26, 2012
With the bulk of the audience divided from the main stage by a net barrier, it quickly became clear that Joe Hill-Gibbins’s celebrated production of Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling was deeply concerned with the question of who, exactly, was being watched. While the floor-level stage surrounded by tiers and galleries of spectators cast the …
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