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 MoreThis performance reconstructs the original play to centre on Lady Macbeth, who is suffering from the consciousness of guilt. The Doctor hypnotizes Lady Macbeth to face this overpowering guilt. Lady Macbeth is directed by Tae-sook Han, which has been continually performed since the 1998 premiere, was at this time recreated as a Pansori version. Pansori is a Korean traditional opera like Peking opera of China. Eun-hye Jung, a prima donna of Pansori, performed the role of Lady Macbeth.
Read MoreHamlet returns to his hometown to find his father dead in a mysterious accident, and his uncle both married to his mother and the unopposed chief of everything his father once held. Before long he sees a vengeful spirit urging him to take revenge. Witness Hamlet's journey into madness, moral dilemma and chaos as he tries reclaiming what's rightfully his.
This adaptation contemporizes the plot, characters and language of Hamlet. It uses a modern Hindi prose diction interspersed with verse translations of the soliloquies and some English phrases. The effect is like Bollywood.
Read MoreDirector's Note: “I began my work on Hamlet with seven second year students of NSD in the last week of November. We had taken the play-within-the play in Hamlet for a series of improvisations. We tried to understand the play through this most brilliantly constructed scene by Shakespeare. It opened up many possibilities of making a performance of Hamlet with this scene at the centre. In spite of the problem of time and logistic constraints, the students gave their best. Often the actors doubled up as set, property and costume makers as well, as we did not have the students of design and direction with us. What you witness is a series of improvisations in which the students contributed much more than I did as the director of the play. The emphasis[...]was on the process per se and not the end product.”
The production is a polished, intense exploration in a small studio space of Hamlet's twin dilemmas of the duty of vengeance and the mother's remarriage.
A robust production in modern dress. Its adaptive energies lie in the contemporized revisioning of Shakespeare. The military milieu is emphasized, and Othello and Iago are buddies, even seen gyming together. Iago's wiliness is believable and Othello's susceptibility becomes understandable. Desdemona is spirited: she jumps out of the bed and runs to the bedroom door banging on it for help at the end. The verse in translation is handled with ease and fluency, adding to the contemporary performance of the play.
Read MoreKeon-young Moon and Jung-min Park, two Korean movie and television stars, performed the title roles. Even though Director Jung-ung Yang is famous for adapting Shakespeare in his own way, this time he created a beautiful and fairy-tale-like tragic love story by following the original text comparatively closely. But there were differences: Friar Lawrence spoke the prologue and Nurse the epilogue. All of parents of two lovers were left out.
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This performance dramatized the comic elements of the original play very effectively. This production employed comical modern dresses and pictorial stage design reminiscent of Fernando Botero's paintings. Actors' and actresses' performances were swift, delightful, and sophisticated.
Read MoreThis performance of The Winter’s Tale by AMERINDA, a Native American cast and crew, uses Shakespeare's play to explore contemporary themes like environmental destruction, political climates of division, and questions of the laws of nations.
Read MoreThe first Shakespeare production to be put on by Carving Ice Theatre.
“A King & his 3 best friends swear off women for three years. What will happen when a Princess & her 3 best friends comes to visit? Can the men possibly resist the women? Will the women ever accept the vows of foolish men?
Shakespeare’s seldom performed romcom takes us to the Kingdom of Navarre where the quest to be in love, & speak from your true heart is marked by flirting, fooling, hunting & composing love poems. Along the way expect some 'sudden breakings-out of mirth' and the longest word in English 'honorificabilitudinitatibus'.” – Carving Ice website
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.
Sintang Dalisay is Tanghalang Ateneo’s rendition of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet in the Sama-Bajau dance tradition. A theatrical adaptation of the metrical romance Ang Sitang Dalisay ni Julieta at Romeo by G. D. Roke.
Read More“The Tempest Reimagined is a co-production between the British Council and PETA (Philippine Educational Theater Association). It is a modern adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest set on a Philippine island hit by super typhoon Haiyan, and incorporates stories of the storm’s survivors. It features award-winning artists from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts (RADA), Hong Kong, and Japan.” –description from the British Council website
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Director Jung-ung Yang emphasized the contemporaneity of the play with modern and cosmopolitan costumes, music and dances. The imagistic stage was very impressive, too. The 30m depth stage covered with 50t sand created the image of sea and island. The gigantic statue of Diana's head, which was laid down sideway on the stage left, expressed the precarious deity. The huge images of a compass and a moon, which were alternatively projected on the back screen of the stage, gave a proper background to Pericles, who wanders from place to place. Gower, who led the whole play as a narrator, was transformed into old Pericles.
Read More“Witches and ghosts, madness and murder, swordfights, soliloquies, and two of the most compelling characters ever created…
Part myth and part morality play, a profound examination of the psychology of guilt and the forces that influence human action, this great supernatural thriller makes the perfect finale to the Halloween season!” –from the company website
Read More"What is identity based on when you strip everything else away? How do we identify inside all of our social and familial circles? How do we identify inside of ourselves?
ear is an exploration of one of Shakespeare's most daunting and famous texts, King Lear, combining the stylistic expression of the internationally renowned company Passion in Practice, New York Shakespeare Company and the "gritty, dirt on your knees Shakespeare" approach you've come to know and love from Seven Stages Shakespeare Company.
By exploring this play through the lens of Alzheimer's Disease, we hope to drive a dialogue about memory and legacy on a personal, communal and global level.
Stripping the space to its bare bones, we'll explore one of Shakespeare's most daunting and famous texts-- the story of a family dealing with what they are all capable of in the face of inevitable loss and the power and beauty of forgiveness in those trying times.”
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 MoreHaunted by the prophecies of three nightmarish witches and bolstered by his ambitious wife, Macbeth's thirst for power propels him down a path of tyranny, murder and madness. Featuring butoh-inspired choreography and gruesome stage combat, Hart's aggressive cut, set in a mythological Scotland, promises to be an unnerving and eerie fusion of classic and modern futility.
Read MoreThe hotly anticipated debut from the Auckland Shakespeare Company is here. Lucrece is a reimagining of Shakespeare's darkest poem, The Rape of Lucrece. Working from the original text, four actors take you on the heart stopping journey of Lucrece, the chaste wife of a noble lord, who is sexually violated in her own home by Tarquin, a Roman prince. As a result she commits suicide and her body is paraded through the streets of Rome.
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.
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This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
