The Bardathon


Christmas at the (Snow)Globe, Shakespeare’s Globe, 2019
Featured Post

The new home of The Bardathon

This is the new home of The Bardathon, Peter Kirwan’s review blog of contemporary film and stage productions of early modern drama. The blog began in April 2006, as part of a project to chronicle responses to all fifty-four productions in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Complete Works Festival. Since then, the blog has continued as Peter’s record of all of the stage and screen productions of early modern plays, as well as adaptations and responses, that he has seen.

The blog aims to combine the rapid-response turnaround of theatre journalism with the reflection and insight of scholarly criticism, as part of Peter’s ongoing practice-based research into methods of writing about the contemporary performance of early modern drama. The blog is inevitably partial, with the primary focus on UK productions between 2006 and 2022, and acts as a form of diary of one reviewer’s experience over years of theatregoing.

The blog is used as a resource by researchers and teachers around the Globe, and was hosted by the University of Warwick (2006-2011) and the University of Nottingham (2011-2022) in previous iterations. Please feel free to comment on the reviews, and to get in touch with thoughts and feedback!

Index

Shakespeare: All’s Well that Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Coriolanus, Cymbeline, Hamlet, 1 Henry IV, 2 Henry IV, Henry V, 1 Henry VI, 2 Henry VI, 3 Henry VI, Henry VIII, King John, Julius Caesar, King Lear, Love’s Labour’s Lost, Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado about Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, Sir Thomas More, The Taming of the Shrew, The Tempest, Timon of Athens, Titus Andronicus, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, The Winter’s Tale

Other authors: Beaumont, Chapman, Chettle, Dekker, Fletcher, Ford, Greene, Heywood, Jonson, Kyd, Lyly, Marlowe, Marston, Massinger, Middleton, Peele, Rowley, Shirley, Webster.

Latest Posts

The Birth of Merlin (Treehouse Shakespeare Ensemble) @ The Blackfriars Playhouse

Never has a side-eye side-eyed more side-eydily than the side-eye of George Durfee’s Toclio. Amid a court of international intrigue, royal marriages, internecine conflicts, and warring magicians, the smooth Toclio – whose sudden appearance at one point caused the Briton nobles to jump in shock, and who was often the only representative of the Britons…

King Lear (Shakespeare Theatre Company) @ The Klein Theatre

Few Lears have ever made an entrance with the panache of Patrick Page in Simon Godwin’s already-lauded Shakespeare Theatre Company production. The doors of the hangar (designed by Daniel Soule) in which his daughters, sons-in-law and attendants waited anxiously slid open. A full-size small plane could be seen through the doors, its running lights throwing…

Titus Andronicus (Shakespeare’s Globe) @ The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

“It’s a story of men killing men killing men killing women killing men killing men killing men killing children killing men killing men killing men killing clowns killing men killing men killing men killing flies” crooned the pyjama-clad, all-female-identifying company of the Globe’s Titus Andronicus. The promise of this opening number – a murder ballad,…

The Merchant of Venice 1936 @ Watford Palace Theatre

The choice to perform The Merchant of Venice in a current political climate rife with antisemitism specifically and xenophobia more broadly requires care, to say the least. Produced at a time when moral leadership on immigration was being provided primarily by a football pundit, Brigid Larmour’s production (created in collaboration with actor Tracy-Ann Oberman, who…

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