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Fighting
No full textA highly engaging text that approaches Shakespeare as a maker of theatre, as well as a writer of literature. Leading performance critics dismantle Shakespeare's texts, identifying theatrical cues in ways which develop understanding of the underlying theatricality of Shakespeare's plays and stimulate further performances
Henry VI in performance : history, culture and Shakespeare reproduced
Full text linkThe long-neglected Henry VI plays have been 'rediscovered' by a number of post-war
productions which have found new ways of bringing Shakespeare's civil war plays to modern
audiences. The Wars of the Roses, directed by Peter Hall and adapted by Hall and John Barton,
established the theatrical vitality of the plays and defined them for a generation as 'national'
dramas. I argue that many of the most important and mythologised aspects of that production
were contingent upon the difficult situation of the RSC in the early 1960s and that, in fact, the
'tradition' of playing the Henry VI plays as national dramas is an invented one, based upon the
Tillyardian interpretation of them as 'matter of England' plays. Nevertheless, The Wars of the
Roses has cast a massive shadow over subsequent productions of the Henry VI plays. Most
notably, two productions in the late 1980s - the RSC's The Plantagenets and the ESC's The Wars
of the Roses - were virtual revivals of the 1963 productions whilst even those that, at the time,
seemed to be reacting against Hall and Barton - the RSC's trilogy of 1977 and the BBC's
tetralogy of 1981/3 - in fact bore their influence in that they staged the plays as 'matter of
England' productions. 'England' took on a different meaning however after the election of the
Conservative Government in 1979. Mrs. Thatcher introduced market ideologies into the funding
of theatres and this forced rapid, radical and often unwelcome changes to the culture of the large
theatres: England became a divided and contested site and rubbed against the resolution that Hall
and Barton had sought in 1963. In the third chapter, I will examine in detail three 1980s
productions which were shaped by this situation, but also responded to, engaged with, and
attempted to subvert the Thatcherite appropriation of national identity. Finally, I argue that all of
these performances exhibit a deep anxiety about social changes and about the role of
Shakespearean theatre within these changes
The British Conference of Undergraduate Research
Full text linkGuest editorial from: Stuart Hampton-Reeves (Head of Graduate Research School, Director of the Centre for Research-informed Teaching, University of Central Lancashire
Othello: A guide to the text and the play in performance
No full textOthello is one of Shakespeare's most theatrically striking plays. This Handbook focuses on Othello as a dramatic work which exploits the resources of the early modern stage and yet still challenges contemporary theatres. Exploring race and gender as performance issues throughout the study, Stuart Hampton-Reeves:
• examines the play's earliest performances and the problem of staging darkness on Shakespeare's stage
• analyses the play from a performance point of view scene by scene, line by line
• surveys key productions and films, tracing the play's move away from mainstream theatres
• draws together the latest criticism on Othello's treatment of identity and sexuality
‘A noise of thunder’ : Shakespeare and Jazz
No full textThis chapter focuses on several key moments when the history of jazz intersected with Shakespeare. It discusses, analyses, and contextualizes the three most significant jazz suites composed with a Shakespearean theme: Duke Ellington’s Shakespeare-inspired Such Sweet Thunder (1957), George Russell’s Othello Ballet Suite (1968), and Shakespeare Songs by Guillaume de Chassy and Christophe Marguet (2016). Shakespeare’s connection with jazz dates right back to the music’s early years, when both the word and the music were synonymous with modernity, youth, and Americanization. After several early attempts to set Shakespeare’s words to music, Ellington’s Such Sweet Thunder (written with Billy Strayhorn) was the first significant jazz composition to engage with Shakespeare in a creative and non-verbal way, blending swing harmonies with European atonal ideas. Russell’s experimental interpretation of Othello went even further in fragmenting the text into repeated motifs and polytonal soundscapes. The chapter concludes with a study of a recent Shakespeare suite, de Chassy and Marguet’s set of compositions inspired by lines in Shakespeare. For all these musicians, the plays are a starting point for musical creations which draw on the signature sounds of jazz and twentieth-century experiments in atonal and polytonal music
Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Hall
No full textPeter Hall directed his first Shakespeare production in 1954 and his last in 2011. His career spanned more than half-a-century of innovation in theatre and, for much of that time, Hall was at its epicentre. His achievements as the founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) and then the second (and to date longest-serving) Director of the National Theatre (NT) have been the subject of many studies, but his work as a director of Shakespeare has often been in the background, footnotes to his career as a maker of theatrical institutions. For the purposes of this study, the story of the RSC and the NT is part of the background to Hall’s work as a maker of theatre. Some of his productions have been so significant that they have been the subject of scholarly articles, university dissertations and monographs, but many have never been studied in any depth. To date, no study has attempted to bring all of Hall’s Shakespeare productions together and see them in a context which arcs from the post-war welfare capitalism of the 1950s through to the post-9/11 turn back to war and nationalism in the first decade of the new millennium. This book aims to do that
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