A Winter’s Tale (Scene Individible) @ The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre
June 10, 2022
It’s perhaps inevitable that a company based in Stratford-upon-Avon – a town plagued with living statues – would end up producing a play with two of them. Scene Individible’s company-devised A Winter’s Tale, created in response to a brief to talk back to Shakespeare, took advantage of the paradoxes of living statues: the stillness that …
The Winter’s Tale/Le Conte d’Hiver (Shakespeare in the Ruins) @ online
August 1, 2021
Winnipeg’s Shakespeare in the Ruins has been producing Shakespeare in the picturesque Trappist Monastery Ruins since the early 1990s. While so many outdoor-based theatre companies around the world have been among the first to return to in-person performances during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss has been more ambitious, spearheading …
The Winter’s Tale (SHAKE Festival) @ Zoom
July 31, 2021
Following the initiation of the live online Zoom/YouTube readings of Shakespeare by The Show Must Go Online early in the pandemic, a number of other organisations have worked to put on Shakespeare readings of their own. SHAKE Festival is unusual among them for two reasons: its ticketed entry (as opposed to inviting donations) and its …
The Winter’s Tale (RSC) @ BBC4
April 26, 2021
It’s become customary to see theatre shows performed in empty auditoria over the last year, but perhaps none quite so grandly empty as the RSC’s new Winter’s Tale. This is a production that has skipped over its own ‘gap of time’ – fully rehearsed but pulled just before it was due to open back in …
The Winter’s Tale (The Show Must Go Online) @ Zoom
October 28, 2020
As The Show Must Go Online moves into its final four shows in its ambitious project to stage all of the plays from the First Folio as live Zoom readings, the inventiveness of this project continues undiminished. From a screen packed out with footage of farmyard animals interspersed with animals to represent the sheep-shearing, to the …
The Winter’s Tale (Renegade Theatre) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (via Globe Player)
September 4, 2020
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 …
Ali Smith, ‘Summer’ (Hamish Hamilton)
August 16, 2020
In one of Ali Smith’s trademark dizzying verbal association games, an unnamed character in Summer explains that a load-bearing stone is often called a ‘summer’; at which another character, Grace, muses on why we load summer with so many expectations, much more than the other seasons. It’s framed as a time of renewal, of rest, …
The Winter’s Tale (Royal Ballet) @ The Royal Opera House (webstream)
May 6, 2020
While there is a long and proud history of dance adaptations of Shakespeare, Christopher Wheeldon’s retelling of The Winter’s Tale is apparently the first time this play has ever been rendered as ballet. It’s surprising, especially given the proto-musical trappings of the sheep-shearing festival, and the play’s interest in visual imagery, most notably in the statue of Hermione. …
The Winter’s Tale @ Shakespeare’s Globe
June 30, 2018
Ever since I was blown away by the Globe’s touring production of The Winter’s Tale a decade ago, I’ve been longing to see the play in the main Globe space. For better or worse, the theatre is a natural enabler of laughter; so how does the final awakening of faith, the injunction not to stir, …
The Winter’s Tale (National Theatre) @ The Dorfman
February 16, 2018
I’m something of a Winter’s Tale completist these days, so it was a joy to get to see the National’s new touring version for young people. Stripped down to an hour and five minutes, Justin Audibert’s pared-down production took a complex and devastating play, and turned it into a heartwarming, and often uncompromising, examination of …
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