Hamlet, de los Andes, Teatro de los Andes

/ Touring/

Hamlet, de los Andes is a free adaptation of The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare. This take on Hamlet is a Bolivian one, drawn from a distinct reading by the company and the director. They have contextualized the play in the struggle and uncertainty of trying to reconcile a modern world with an ancient tradition, and restructured the play in an abridged version, relying on just three actors and one musician. The storyline and the events have been simplified and the characters reduced. Their Hamlet is a modern day man who has lost his self-awareness. He faces the impossibility of recognizing and coming to terms with himself after the fall. Who is Hamlet? Is it me or is it you? Is Hamlet the Teatro de los Andes itself? Is it the most recent bit of Bolivian history? By means of a proposal packed with metaphors and intertextuality, Teatro de Los Andes’ Hamlet experiences the uprising of the being, of art, of the homeland, of the world. 

Read More

Ricardo III, INBA, Mexico

/ Del Bosque Cultural Centre/
Ricardo III, INBA, Mexico

Richard III is the story of a nobleman who is determined to seize the crown of England. A man without scruples, a prodigious monster, an extraordinary villain and eternal warrior. Richard is the incarnation of selfishness, ambition, despotism and betrayal, a man who seduces everyone in his path and makes them fall under the spell of his insatiable desire for power. Richard's battle is with himself, but the victims are the public. This adaptation seeks to link Shakespeare's story and the history of Mexico at a very visceral level.

Read More

Medida por Medida, INBA

/ Del Bosque Cultural Centre/
Medida por Medida, INBA

The performance took place at the Cultural Centre del Bosque as a part of global programme of events and activities destined to celebrate William Shakespeare’s work on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death. The Mexican adaptation of Measure for Measure preserves the original Shakespearean plot, which brings to life a conflict both passionate and simple in nature, a story line with major consequences, one that exceeds the limits of intimacy and is transformed into a matter of power. 

Read More

The Mousetrap: Anti-Hamlet

/

A work-in-progress by three young actors.

“Weaving personal critique with the canonical Western text, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare, three theatre-makers from Metro Manila eviscerate the rigours of classical theatre through irreverent intrusions of performance art, devised-theatre, DIY aesthetics, all within a self-imposed PHP 5,000.00 budget.” –description from the Karnabal Festival Facebook site

Read More

Hamlet, Teatro UNAM

/ Foro Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz/
Hamlet, Teatro UNAM

Flavio Gonzalez Mello’s adaptation of Hamlet is a contemporary production that preserves the original Shakespearean plot, but situates the story within the current Mexican social context. The performance took place at the Sor Juana Forum as a part of global programme of events and activities destined to celebrate William Shakespeare’s work on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of his death.

Read More

Pericles, Prince of La Habana, Celebrating Cultures

/ La Casona en Linea/

Celebrating Cultures present a new production of William Shakespeare’s Pericles in a new translation by Salvador Oliva and Angel Luis Pujante.

Pericles will use the context of Cuba itself, finding home grown cultural equivalents – a boxing tournament replaces knights in armour, a Santeria priest heals Pericles’ wife who is thought to have died. The play will be intertwined with Cuban vocal melodies and Caribbean percussion.

Pericles, one of Shakespeare’s less typical plays, and originally set in the Mediterranean, transplants effortlessly to the Caribbean, from one sea to another where Pericles is shipwrecked.  A myriad surreptitious coincidences draw in the audience to follow the twists and turns of the story, each new scene a surprise, contrasting vividly with the previous one.

Pericles takes part in two contests to win a bride, believes his wife to have died at sea in childbirth and that his daughter, 14 years later, has also died only to be reunited with both of them. Pirates sell his daughter to a brothel and his wife isn’t really dead. And so it goes, suspension of disbelief continually hanging by a thread in this fast paced, twisting tale of great loss and greater redemption filled with warriors, assassins, pirates, fishermen and whores.

Shakespeare's momentous tale and unforgettable characters combined with Cuba’s political, religious and unforgiving passion couldn’t fit a better Elizabethan glove.

Read More

Otello, Metropolitan Opera

/ Metropolitan Opera/

“Italian opera’s greatest tragedy, Otello is a miraculous union of music and drama, a masterpiece as profound philosophically as it is thrilling theatrically. Shakespeare’s tale of an outsider, a great hero who can’t control his jealousy, was carefully molded by the librettist Arrigo Boito into a taut and powerful opera text. Otello almost wasn’t written: following the success of Aida and his setting of the Requiem mass in the early 1870s, Verdi considered himself retired, and it took Boito and publisher Giulio Ricordi several years to persuade him to take on a major new work.”
--description from the Metropolitan Opera website

Read More

Hamlet Day, University of Ottawa

/ University of Ottawa/
Hamlet Day, University of Ottawa

“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

6th Shakespeare Festival, Buenos Aires/VI Festival Shakespeare Buenos Aires

/

From Buenos Aires, the city that celebrated Latin America's first Shakespeare festival, we kick off a series of activities, tributes, celebrations and festivals... commemorating the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare. There will also be an equivalent number of events related to the works of Cervantes... who died on the same day and year as Shakespeare.

Read More

By heart, Teatro Nacional D. Maria II

/

“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