Thank you for visiting our archive. Each performance submitted to our website will be explained in detail in its own blog post. You can choose to look through these posts in a variety of ways.
Venice, 1574: two charlatans and mountebanks are asked to stage Romeo and Juliet in honour of Henry III Valois who is visiting the city. In a couple of hours, they have to find the right Juliet; a chaste and beautiful maid is needed. They pick out a provocative courtesan, Veronica. The show we attend is an open rehearsal, rich in improvisation acts in the style of "commedia dell'arte."
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Struggles of nationality, ambition and gender-inequality set the tone for a different take on Othello. In a landscape of Plastic and Isolation, Othello marries the daughter of an Icelandic entrepreneur. Iago, an ambitious woman, feels betrayed when Othello selects a young man as his next in command. Co-produced by Vesturport.
Read MoreOn the amateur/campus Shakespeare end of the spectrum, this gender-blind production was billed as 'a story of possibility, of picking ourselves up when the worst has happened': quite appropriate, then, that this uproariously funny, fast-paced, and compassionate Tempest premiered the week after the US election.
This reading of Pericles aimed to cultivate collaborative networks between local and international scholars, students, theatre practitioners, and the wider public. As far as records can determine, the staged reading was only the second ever performance of Pericles in Ireland and the first ever performance of the play in Munster.
Read MoreA takeover of Battersea’s Gallery on the Corner - combining live performance with installation art - to tell the story of Shakespeare’s infamous She-Wolf of France. The text is pieced together from the War of the Roses tetralogy, with some additional new writing.
Read MoreGlenda Jackson takes on the role of King Lear in this much-awaited production of the tragedy at London’s Old Vic. It comes 25 years after Jackson’s decision to give up acting for politics.
Read MoreFounded in 1921 by Don Gaetano Napoli, Marionettistica Fratelli Napoli is a family run company specialised in the traditional Sicilian puppet theatre called Opera dei Pupi. The creative cast is almost exclusively made up by family members and they also cover all the roles of performances.
The Fratelli Napoli’s adaptation of Richard III is the distinctive result of the traditional Opera dei Pupi, the Sicilian Puppet Theatre. Therefore, all characters act according to that tradition. For instance, Richard III’s interpretation is heavily influenced by that of Gano di Magonza, the stock character which is the villain par excellence in the epic poem The Song of Roland, the favourite and most represented adaptation of the Opera dei Pupi.
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An evocative re-interpretation of Lear choreographed by John Scott and featuring Valda Setterfield, one of the world’s most acclaimed postmodern dancers. A trio of male dancers play the daughters to Setterfield’s king, as the performance shifts effortlessly between movement and spoken dialogue, between Shakespeare’s text and the heartbreaking realities of aging in our contemporary world.
Read MoreLear has dementia. His children never visit him. He forbids it, ever since they betrayed him and he disowned them many years ago. So what happens when Cordelia - his youngest, whose betrayal was the greatest - knocks on his door? Why has she come back? What's her story? And is there any chance of reconciliation?
Lear/Cordelia is an experimental double-bill: a radical reworking of Shakespeare's King Lear followed by Cordelia, a new play from the perspective of Lear's youngest daughter.
Digital projection-mapping combines with Shakespeare and new writing to open up the emotional landscapes of a man with dementia and the woman who tries to reconnect with him.
Lear/Cordelia pilot production is based on our research-and-development project that explored King Lear in the context of dementia through participatory research.
Read MoreThis show was designed as a site-specific staging of Macbeth, in the wardrobe of Basilica Palladiana in Vicenza. In this space the directors wanted to recreate the crudeness of the contemporary world in juxtaposition with the rich beauty of the Basilica itself. Their version of Macbeth, as they remark, stresses "the radicalism of evil of the human soul, which leads to deceit and folly, in a constant contrast between the supernatural and the deviant interpretation of reality."
Read MoreW.S. Tempest is the third episode of a Shakespearean 'trilogy of water' that Teatro del Lemming has worked on in the last few years. During the performance, the whole Shakespearean corpus is evoked, as if its characters were small fragments of ourselves. W.S. Tempest is the telling of a shipwreck which initially occurs in the mind of Prospero/Shakespeare who, from the sea depths, evokes its characters as if in rapture.
Read MoreBedouin Shakespeare Company’s production of The Tempest aims to make Shakespeare’s play accessible and entertaining to an audience largely composed of students. The production, characterized by spare staging, emphasized the comic and magical dimensions of The Tempest, the third Shakespeare production the company has brought to the UAE since 2012.
Read MoreThe Lovers is inspired by the stories of well known Shakespearean couples. It is a site-specific performance investigating the tortuous tensions which give spaces, relationships and events an erotic dimension and which become unexpected ground for love. A poetic, raw and sometimes grotesque exploration inside the human being, where sensuality can be grafted in the darkest passions, in the most difficult conditions or in the playful taste of pleasure.
Read MoreCole Porter's popular Kiss Me Kate, a musical based on Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew was part of the Welsh National Opera's autumn Shakespeare400 Season. WNO Artistic Director David Pountney said ‘It's a marvellous opportunity for us to bring together enormously varied works which Shakespeare’s works have inspired.’
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An epic double family drama about mothers and daughters, fathers and sons. In Willmott’s production Lear, a Queen with failing mental faculties, finds it impossible to retire gracefully and is cast out by her eldest daughters. Meanwhile the Duke of Gloucester's ruthless son plots to steal his brother's inheritance.
Read MoreThe UK Premiere of pianist and composer André Tchaikowsky's opera based on Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice. The opera is a potent attack on prejudice, a deeply personal response to Tchaikowsky's experiences as a child in the Warsaw Ghetto, that was unperformed for three decades before David Pountney commissioned performances at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. The Welsh National Opera production was part of the Welsh National Opera's autumn Shakespeare400 Season. WNO Artistic Director Pountney said “It's a marvellous opportunity for us to bring together enormously varied works which Shakespeare’s works have inspired.”
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Billed as Britain's first all-black Hamlet, Black Theatre Live's production was set in Denmark, a Black Empire of modern England, where an intelligent young student discovers the world he once knew has crumbled. Dramaturg Mark Norfolk used Peter Brook's stripped back Hamlet as his textual blueprint to get to the heart of the play, expanding it with new text to better explore both Hamlet and the play's female characters.
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Shakespeare's play reimagined through the eyes of Lady Macbeth's chambermaid, annoyed at only having one short scene in Shakespeare's original.
Read MoreVerdi described Macbeth as 'one of mankind's greatest creations'. His opera based on the play was part of the Welsh National Opera's autumn Shakespeare400 Season. WNO Artistic Director David Pountney said ‘It's a marvellous opportunity for us to bring together enormously varied works which Shakespeare’s works have inspired.’
Read MoreWith its love both for improvisation and Shakespeare, 123 Schtunk has created a unique version of Romeo and Juliet where both laughter and tears have their places. The company toured with the show between 2006-2008, and it is now in their repertoire again with completely new, self-written music.
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This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
