The English kings of Shakespeare’s history plays are so convincingly portrayed that they have become historical reality for most people. For example, we follow Shakespeare’s King Henry V from his early youth, enjoying his training for kingship. We are witnesses of his great decisions, we smile at his charming approach to women and we thrill [...]
As the summer-spanning Shakespeare extravaganza that is the World Shakespeare Festival comes to an end in the UK we’ve flicked through the NoSweatShakespeare facebook page to pull together a selection of our favourite moments from the festival. With over 70 productions and exhibitions, 50 theatre companies and thousands of international artists there was certainly plenty of choice, but the [...]
This year, 2012, is probably the biggest year for William Shakespeare in England since his death. Two of the UK’s biggest cultural institutions, the BBC and the Royal Shakespeare Company, have teamed up with the World Shakespeare Festival to provide a huge Shakespeare tapestry covering the country in the media and on stages in Stratford, London, Newcastle, Birmingham, Wales and Scotland. [...]
At a time when all of Shakespeare’s plays are being staged in different places on different kinds of stage in thirty-seven different languages I’m thinking about how different the staging of Shakespeare’s plays are from when Shakespeare wrote them to be staged in his own Globe Theatre. Very often, these days, when you attend the [...]
Happy New Year to all our readers. This is a big year for Shakespeare. It’s not a very well known fact, but Shakespeare played a role in winning the Olympic Games for London. Not only is he the most famous London resident of turn of sixteenth/seventeenth century London but also, according to the results of [...]
London is the world’s top tourist destination, and so it should be. There are far more beautiful great cities, regarding their natural settings – Cape Town, Sydney, Rio – and more beautiful cities architecturally – Venice, Amsterdam – but there is no place as historically and culturally exciting as London. When I recently saw a [...]
If you’re ever going to be involved in a production of Macbeth you should be very careful, and take precautions. Remember, you’ve been warned. There’s a curse on performances of the play. The first thing you should never do is mention the play’s title in the theatre. You should always refer to it as ‘The [...]