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."
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.
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.
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In a prison that looks very much like Hell, suspended in space and time, Othello is bound to endlessly atone for the murder of Desdemona. Delirious and obsessed, he becomes one with his nemesis, Iago. Othello's Guilt paints a dystopian picture of jealousy, personal anguish and self-destruction, using exclusively Shakespeare's words.
Roberto Cavosi's new adaptation highlights the relationship between good and evil - themes which inhabit us all. Cavosi’s work absorbs and transforms the psychological intensity at the heart of modern and contemporary theatre, from Pirandello to Beckett. With Othello’s Guilt, the company wishes to reach a multicultural audience who are willing to be challenged by an original and innovatory approach to Shakespeare.
After its premiere (in Italian) at the Teatro Antico in Segesta (Sicily) in August, this 55 minute monologue marks the return to The Rose of actor Marco Gambino, who has recently received international acclaim after appearing in popular Italian television series Squadra Antimafia and Young Montalbano.
Read MoreThe two directors, who also adapted the text, believe that their production presents the figure of a new man. Macbeth is an antihero who brings within him fairness and unfairness, a sort of Copernicus who in between the Sixteenth and Seventeenth century challenges the status quo. He oscillates between the symbolic inheritance and the new relativism which leads to modernity.
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Romeo and Juliet, the Romantic tragedy par excellence, becomes a middle-class tragedy about generational clashes in Andrea Baracco’s vision. The tearing conflicts which run through the whole story show us an adult world shut in its own unmoving universe—its houses are like shop windows. The adults are just interested in keeping their own privileges and remain impassive to the uneasiness and the violent passions which overcome their sons and daughters. Baracco's reading of this classic tries to tell us about our contemporary world, hanging in the balance between fidelity to the original and his own interpretation of it characterized by a stylized theatrical language.
Read MoreThis production pays special attention to the play's characterization by portraying, for example, Romeo and Juliet's love, Mercutio's sensitive, delicate foolishness, Benvolio's young but wise loyalty, and Tebaldo's strength and boldness.
Read MoreThe playtext used for the show is based on the 1597 First Quarto (Q1) of Romeo and Juliet, translated and staged integrally for the first time in Italy. Teatrino del Giullare stages Romeo and Juliet as a comic tragedy made of contrasts and illusions, a tale built on reflections, anxieties and desires created with the help of masks which the the two performers characteristically employ in every creation they stage.
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Director Luca De Fusco worked on the text in order to highlight the weird elements present within it. In his opinion, the fundamental moments in the play are all pervaded by an oneiric, dreamlike atmosphere which goes as far as the unreal. At the centre of the scene he puts the Macbeths' bedroom, because he believes that more than a play about war and dead it is a play about a philosophical, theological and psychiatric struggle.
Read MoreAll 74 on-stage deaths from Shakespeare's oeuvre realized in physical comedy by four actors. With a LED-display counter monitoring the 75 deaths (they include the fly in Titus Andronicus) and propelling the action to the zero, The Complete Deaths is a fast-paced and entertaining tribute to the tragic ends of so many of Shakespeare's characters.
Read MoreGiulio Cesare – Pezzi staccati (Julius Caesar – Spared Parts) is a show inspired by Shakespeare’s tragedy. Romeo Castellucci brings back to the theatre a shortened version of his ground-breaking 1997 production of Julius Caesar in a new version made up of ‘fragments’ that evoke the original.
Read More“A salt and pepper pot for the king and queen. A vase for the prince. A matchbox for the servant. A toilet roll tube for the Innkeeper. A water bottle for the messenger.
In Complete Works six performers create condensed versions of each and every Shakespeare play, comically and intimately retelling them, using a collection of everyday objects as stand-ins for the characters on the one-metre stage of an ordinary table top."
The adaptation is created for twelve dancers and a quintet of musicians. Theshow is inspired by the well known Shakespearean tragedy. Contemporary dance and tango interact to give birth to an increasingly compelling show, featuring fantastic dancers and “argentinian tangueros.”
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Othello's story told by Shakespeare is a tragedy, and told by Verdi is a melodrama. What if the same story is told by an eclectic actress such as Marina Massironi? It becomes a hilarious set of circumstances about passions and intrigues moving from the 16th to 19th Centuries, with unexpected and pungent references to the original as well.
The production premiered in 2014, presented in 2016 in a revival to celebrate the Shakespeare anniversary. Academy award winner Nicola Piovani composed the musical score which is played live during the show to accompany the Clown’s songs and to provide musical accompaniment to scene changes and to underline key moments.
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“One of Shakespeare's greatest plays, The Winter's Tale, though written at the same period as The Tempest, smashes all the rules that The Tempest follows. Unity of time, place and action are hurled aside as we range across Europe, from court to country, from high tragedy to low comedy, across a time span of sixteen years.
The Winter's Tale tells of a delusional and paranoid king who tears his family apart. But this is the new Shakespeare, after he completed his great tragedies, and the tough struggle for redemption yields flickers of hope. Initial darkness gives way to joy as Time leads the characters to a shattering conclusion...
Produced by Cheek by Jowl in a co-production with the Barbican, London; Les Gémeaux/Sceaux/Scène Nationale; Grand Théâtre de Luxembourg; Piccolo Teatro di Milano - Teatro d'Europa; Chicago Shakespeare Theater; Centro Dramático Nacional, Madrid (INAEM)” (Information from the Cheek by Jowl website)
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This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
