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.
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 MoreIn this adaptation of Twelfth Night, "Dan Jemmett’s playful, poetic production takes audiences back to the seaside of the 1970s, as Feste the clown breaks out his vinyls of Herb Alpert and Geoff Love on his vintage turntable, and five actors frantically slip between the play’s 18 roles in a farcical mix of music hall, pantomime and vaudeville, where boys play girls playing boys playing girls" (description from Festival Programme).
Read More“The Festival d’Avignon celebrated its 70th edition in 2016 and while there were no major Shakespearean productions on the main programme, they dominated the programme of the Festival Off d’Avignon (the fringe festival). The only playwright whose works were performed and adapted more was Molière. From puppet shows to experimental takes on the tragedies, Le Off offered a wide range of Shakespeare for all ages.”
Read More
"« Etre ou ne pas être », plus qu’une question existentielle, le soliloque nous plonge dans la valse-hésitation de l’engagement de l’individu par rapport à soi-même et à sa société. Créé en juin à l’occasion du 400e de la mort de Shakespeare, cette performance explore les tensions et le dialogue possible entre la voix d’Hamlet modulée et manipulée par un fil de fériste et le mouvement même du corps et de la pensée cherchant une issue à l’impasse. Exploration ciblée de l’atelier de recherche en dramaturgie circassienne."
Read MoreSince 1991 a recreation of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre has stood on the racecourse in Neuss, Germany. Each year it hosts a summer festival and the 2016 edition showcased productions from companies across Europe including several premieres, a puppet Tempest, and a one-woman Henry VIII. The festival also included a classical Shakespeare concert, a lecture by Patrick Spottiswoode of the London Globe, and a series of events exploring the idea of ‘Shakespeare and beyond’ which included a stage version of Woody Allen’s 1982 film A Midsummer Night’s Sex Comedy and an adaptation of Friedrich Schiller’s Maria Stuart. The majority of productions were presented in German; German surtitles were available for those presented in English or French.
Read MoreEach year, London-based company Tower Theatre (one of the companies selected to be part of the RSC's 2016 A Midsummer Night's Dream "play for the nation" project) takes a production to the Pré Catalan garden in the Bois de Boulogne, Paris. In 2016 - the 25th year of Tower Theatre in Paris - they presented Romeo and Juliet in the garden's Théâtre de Verdure du Jardin Shakespeare. The open-air theatre space is planted with flowers, trees and plants that are mentioned in Shakespeare's plays.
Read More
A punk-rock, dynamic and visceral take on Shakespeare’s classic A Midsummer Night’s Dream interpreted by the 3rd year students of the Théâtre du Pommier in Neuchâtel (CH) as they end their training in drama.
Read More
“England’s idealistic army marches to war, certain of a swift and glorious victory. France proudly rallies to defend her borders from invasion. But as nations clash, it is the common soldiers who pay the ultimate price in the bloody mud of the battlefield.
Marking both the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt and the ongoing centenary of the First World War, Antic Disposition presents a new production of Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Performed by a combined cast of British and French actors, the uplifting production celebrates the rich and complex historical relationship between our two nations – from the Hundred Years War to the Entente Cordiale.”
Read More
The Swedish premiere of Ambroise Thomas’ opera. Director Stephen Langridge - artistic director – focuses on political manipulation and family relations that are so complex they could drive anyone to madness. In a modern setting where you are watched everywhere it’s hard to differ between reality, illusion and paranoid delusions.
Read More
“A multilingual reading of Hamlet– the most frequently performed and translated play in the world — by the students, faculty, alumni, and supporters of the University of Ottawa.”
Read More
“If we say one of the names, the other follows it. Our memory cannot evoke one without the other. Plutarch wrote that, from them on, love became the ability to see the world through the sensibility of someone else’s soul.
They mixed love and politics and came up with a politics of love. They are a historical love story. They are a romance based on real events often romanticized about. Shakespeare built them a verbal monument that turned into the truest of truths what never happened to them. In Mankiewicz’s film that led 20th Century Fox to bankruptcy, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were the celluloid and real couple they never – and always – were.
In this show written and directed by Tiago Rodrigues, Sofia Dias and Vítor Roriz are the here-and-now duo of what they were there-and-then. They are and are not Antony and Cleopatra. They are Antony seeing the world through Cleopatra’s eyes. And vice-versa. Always vice-versa. Vice-versa as a rule of love. Vice-versa as a rule of theatre. This show is seeing the world vicariously, through the sensibility of the souls of Antony and Cleopatra.” (from the company programme)
Read More“In By heart, Portuguese playwright and actor Tiago Rodrigues teaches a poem to 10 people. These 10 people never saw the performance and they have no idea which text they will be learning by heart in front of the audience. While teaching them, Rodrigues unfolds a mix of stories of his soon-to-be-blind grandmother and stories of writers and characters from books that are, somehow, connected both to the old lady and himself. The books are also there, on stage, inside wooden fruit crates. And as each couple of verses is taught to the group of 10 people, improbable connections emerge between Nobel Prize winner Boris Pasternak, a cook from the north of Portugal and a Dutch TV program called Beauty and Consolation, and the mystery behind the choice of this poem is slowly solved.
By heart is a piece about the importance of transmission, of the invisible smuggling of words and ideas that only keeping a text in your memory can provide. It’s about a theatre that recognises itself as that place of transmission of what you can’t measure in meters, euros or bytes. It‘s about the safe hiding-place that forbidden texts have always found in our brains and our hearts, as a guarantee of civilization even in the most barbaric and desolate times. As George Steiner himself would put it in an interview to the TV program Beauty and Consolation: “Once 10 people know a poem by heart, there’s nothing the KGB, the CIA or the Gestapo can do about it. It will survive”. But, bottom line, By heart is a training program for the resistance that only comes to an end when the 10 new soldiers know a poem by heart.” (from the company programme)
Read More
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
