-
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse
![The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised] (Again) (American Shakespeare Center) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse](https://drpeterkirwan.files.wordpress.com/2023/05/complete-works.png?w=600)
Every now and again, I’ve been lucky to see a revival of an existing play that makes that play feel freshly written, as if designed for that company and that moment. The reworking of Death of a Salesman for an African American family; Theatre Wallay’s reworking of The Taming of the Shrew as a commentary…
-
The Winter’s Tale (MBU Shakespeare & Performance) @ The Wharf Loft
The operations of time are central to The Winter’s Tale, not only in the explicit personification of the concept to waft over a generational gap of time, but in the work of duration. An hour-long cut of The Winter’s Tale can easily tell the plot, which is surprisingly straightforward, Autolycus’s machinations aside – and as…
-
The Winter’s Tale (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse and Globe Theatre
Sean Holmes’s alternately delicious and stomach-churning serving of The Winter’s Tale began with an act of ostentatiously conspicuous consumption. A table of four were all served with ortolans, the tiny bird eaten whole while wearing a towel over one’s head. The consumption of ortolans, as famously depicted in Succession (a show this production referenced more…
-
A Winter’s Tale (Scene Individible) @ The Door, Birmingham Repertory Theatre
It’s perhaps inevitable that a company based in Stratford-upon-Avon – a town plagued with living statues – would end up producing a play with two of them. Scene Individible’s company-devised A Winter’s Tale, created in response to a brief to talk back to Shakespeare, took advantage of the paradoxes of living statues: the stillness that is only revealed…
-
The Winter’s Tale/Le Conte d’Hiver (Shakespeare in the Ruins) @ The Trappist Monastery Ruins (film)
Winnipeg’s Shakespeare in the Ruins has been producing Shakespeare in the picturesque Trappist Monastery Ruins since the early 1990s. While so many outdoor-based theatre companies around the world have been among the first to return to in-person performances during the second year of the COVID-19 pandemic, artistic director Rodrigo Beilfuss has been more ambitious, spearheading the company’s…
-
The Winter’s Tale (SHAKE Festival) via Zoom
Following the initiation of the live online Zoom/YouTube readings of Shakespeare by The Show Must Go Online early in the pandemic, a number of other organisations have worked to put on Shakespeare readings of their own. SHAKE Festival is unusual among them for two reasons: its ticketed entry (as opposed to inviting donations) and its…
-
The Winter’s Tale (RSC) via BBC iPlayer
It’s become customary to see theatre shows performed in empty auditoria over the last year, but perhaps none quite so grandly empty as the RSC’s new Winter’s Tale. This is a production that has skipped over its own ‘gap of time’ – fully rehearsed but pulled just before it was due to open back in 2020 by the…
-
The Winter’s Tale (The Show Must Go Online) (live-stream)
As The Show Must Go Online moves into its final four shows in its ambitious project to stage all of the plays from the First Folio as live Zoom readings, the inventiveness of this project continues undiminished. From a screen packed out with footage of farmyard animals interspersed with animals to represent the sheep-shearing, to the use…
-
The Winter’s Tale (Renegade Theatre) @ Shakespeare’s Globe (archival recording)
The Winter’s Tale is structured, at roughly its mid-point, around a passage of time. It’s a play whose passage of sixteen years allows for an evocation of long regret and mourning, of aging and changing, of memory and forgiveness (or not). But in Ìtàn Ògìnìntìn, performed at the Globe as part of the 2012 Globe to Globe Festival,…
-
Ali Smith, ‘Summer’ (Hamish Hamilton)
In one of Ali Smith’s trademark dizzying verbal association games, an unnamed character in Summer explains that a load-bearing stone is often called a ‘summer’; at which another character, Grace, muses on why we load summer with so many expectations, much more than the other seasons. It’s framed as a time of renewal, of rest, of being…
-
Follow
Following
Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
Dr Peter Kirwan 