Into Shakespeare
This category looks at contemporary productions of Shakespeare. They show the inventiveness with which fringe theatre companies find ways of drawing on classical texts to make powerfully engaging contemporary comments.
Featured Into Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s Tempest On The Gold Coast
I have just viewed a great production of Shakespeare’s Tempest. I don’t say that lightly since the last time I ...
Into Shakespeare
As You Like It
As You Like It, directed by Jessica Ruano, rewrites Shakespeare’s comedy by omitting the sub-plots of the play involving the comic characters of Touchstone, Corin, Silvius, Phoebe and Audrey. Her re-arranging and editing of Shakespeare’s narrative ensures that the play is re-written as a tragedy, resisting the redemptive themes in the original As You Like It text.
Into Shakespeare
King Lear
Magnificent from the outset: I was gripped viscerally and imaginatively from the moment the thunderous music catapulted Lear’s savage kingdom onto the stage.
Into Shakespeare
King John
Invariably, the choice of whether a play is rarely or often staged both make the claim that the play is relevant for ‘our times’. Of course, that’s the point. As the audience lives in the here and now, Phil Willmott’s realisation of Shakespeare’sKing John clearly how Shakespeare remains our contemporary. I saw this particularly in way that the production engaged the audience in its psychological depiction of warfare and its exposition of how spiritual and temporal claims live in the figure of the king.
Into Shakespeare
The Taming Of The Shrew
As Shakespeare’s comedy The Taming Of The Shrews highlights, the history of gender politics goes further into the past than the history of suffragettes and equal rights. The idea of a ‘shrew’ is steeped in a mythological ancestry in which furies of one kind or another, once provoked, go on their destructive rampage. Arguably, what Shakespeare shows us in Katherine is the shrew in modern terms, when economic power forms a decisive part of ‘love and marriage’ and aggression has feminine as well as male characteristics.
Into Shakespeare
Shiver
Before the theatre is found and a word is spoken for Shiver, the drama has already begun. Getting to the Yard Theatre to watch Theatre6’s rearrangementof Shakespeare’s Tempest is a drama. The theatre is tucked into an industrial factory site at E9 5EN....The stage setting that you encounter of a lagoon – that’s right you read it correctly – a wet and shimmering lagoon on which two ‘islands’ are placed: one created with wooden pellets on which sits an older man and the other rising out of the water (created with scaffolding) like an oil rig platform on which a young woman is stretched out.
Featured Into Shakespeare
The Tempest
Antic Disposition’s Tempest marks the 400th anniversary of the first recorded performance of the play before James I at Whitehall Palace in 1611. While that venue now no longer exists, the Middle Temple Hall’s direct link to another first performance of a Shakespearean play, Twelfth Night, in 1602, is crucial for maintaining historic and artistic links between the 2011 production and the Elizabethan theatre.
