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.
Wlm Shxpr is an original production by the EDG and Knights of the Light Entertainment. The audience is led in three groups by three performers of the sonnets in a promenade experience of Shakespeare's most famous scenes. All three narrators explain their view on the bard who remains absent. The production encompasses original writing by Daniel Morgenroth and a dozen original songs based on the sonnets by the EDG's music team.
Read More
A performance of Hans Werner Henze's Royal Winter Music, songs inspired by Shakespeare's works. Guitar performance by Stefan Koim, interspersed with dramatic readings of excerpts of the plays. The performance was part of a public lecture cycle (Shakespeare400) which was designed to celebrate Shakespeare and inspire a wide audience.
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 More
Half a dozen actors in ruffs stopped approximately 150 people in the town centre and recited sonnet 23 to them to commemorate Shakespeare's birthday and to advertise upcoming events.
Read More
The Folkwang Shakespeare Festival is an annual event hosted by the Folkwang University of the Arts, Germany. Every year the university invites three other institutions to join them in co-producing a given play. The director/student teams from each university craft their own productions independently, and in their native languages. After performing these at the festival, the teams then band together to craft and perform a collaborative production of the play (in English).
Read More
The Tobacco Factory Theatres opened in 1998 and initiated their two-play Shakespeare at the Tobacco programme in Spring 2000 with King Lear and A Midsummer Night's Dream. The organisation encourages experimentalism and aims to offer excellent art. This year the Factory Theatre season offers a Shakespearean double-bill: Hamlet and All’s Well That Ends Well.
Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory (stf) has produced 23 more Shakespeares (several of them twice), three Chekhovs, Stoppard’s Arcadia, Middleton & Rowley’s The Changeling and Sheridan’s The School for Scandal. It has enjoyed four national tours, co-produced with the Bristol Old Vic and the University of Bristol and played a season in the Barbican’s Pit. For the last two seasons it has co-produced its Bristol seasons with Tobacco Factory Theatres, a partnership that also produced Brian Friel’s neglected play, Living Quarters, at the Factory last autumn.
The company has been widely and repeatedly admired for the clarity of its story-telling, the raw intimacy of its in-the-round style at the Tobacco Factory, and the transparent unselfishness of its ensemble.
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
