76 research outputs found
Shakespeare and child's play : performing lost boys on stage and screen
No full text'Childness' - the essential nature of being a child - remains a vital critical issue for us today. In this text, Carol Rutter shows how recent performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeare's insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of today's society and culture.
Shakespeare wrote more than fifty parts for children, amounting to the first comprehensive portrait of childhood in the English theatre. Focusing mostly on boys, he put sons against fathers, servants against masters, innocence against experience, testing the notion of masculinity, manners, morals, and the limits of patriarchal power. He explored the nature of relationships and ideas about parenting in terms of nature and nurture, permissiveness and discipline, innocence and evil. He wrote about education, adolescent rebellion, delinquency, fostering, and child-killing, as well as the idea of the redemptive child who 'cures' diseased adult imaginations. 'Childness' - the essential nature of being a child - remains a vital critical issue for us today. In Shakespeare and Child's-Play Carol Rutter shows how recent performances on stage and film have used the range of Shakespeare's insights in order to re-examine and re-think these issues in terms of today's society and culture
The Merchant in Venice. Shakespeare in the Ghetto
No full textThis book records the landmark performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Venetian Ghetto in 2016, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the Jewish quarter that gave the world the word ‘ghetto’. Practitioners and critics discuss how this multi-ethnic production and its radical choice to cast five actors as Shylock provided the opportunity to respond creatively to Europe’s legacy of antisemitism, racism and difference. They observe how the place and play stand as ambivalent documents of civilization: instruments of intolerance but also sites of cultural exchange
Review of Carol Chillington Rutter, "Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage"
No full textEnter the Body: Woman and Representation on Shakespeare's Stage
Carol Chillington Rutter
xxi + 218 London and New York Routledge
2000 Paperback £15.99
0‐415‐14164‐8
Review of Stuart Hampton Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter The Henry VI Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006)
No full textReview of Stuart Hampton Reeves and Carol Chillington Rutter The Henry VI Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press 2006
Antonio, il Mercante della nostra storia: Adapting "The Merchant of Venice" for Italian children.
No full textFacing history, facing now : Deborah Warner's Julius Caesar at the Barbican Theatre
No full textDeborah Warner's Julius Caesar sold out before it opened in London in April 2005. Watched closely by the media because it marked Warner's first return to Shakespeare since her 1995 Richard II and because it brought together a stellar company (including Ralph Fiennes, Simon Russell Beale, John Shrapnel, Anton Lesser, and Fiona Shaw), this production generated huge interest because it promised to put a 100-strong crowd of "plebs" on stage. But beyond exciting publicity, what did Warner's Caesar achieve? How far did Warner succeed in making spectators see Caesar as "a play for now," set at a time when the entire world should be looking "at issues of power and whether democracies can survive"? Reviewing Julius Caesar, Carol Chillington Rutter sees the fascination of this production in the intellectual, ideological, personal, and rhetorical contests it staged between three "now" men: Fiennes's Antony, Lesser's Brutus, and Beale's Cassius; she celebrates the clarity of direction that allowed audiences to hear the "speechcraft" of Shakespeare's play as utterly topical. But she also considers the images of modernity that Warner put on stage, images of "now" borrowed from contemporary war photography, and she wonders whether the director, in tying theater to the photographic still, limited performance to a language it does not speak
“Shylock is Dead”: Shakespeare In and Beyond the Ghetto
No full textThis essay relates the genesis of the project that led to the first performance of The Merchant of Venice in the Ghetto of Venice in 2016, the year of the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death and the 500th anniversary of the foundation of the Ghetto, the site that provided the world with the concept of the ‘ghetto’. The essay puts the relation- ship between Shakespeare and the Ghetto in historical perspective, starting from W.D. Howells’s visit to the Ghetto in the 1860s, through the point of view of a young Jewish Ital- ian admirer of Shakespeare before and during Fascism, to the post-War transformations of the Ghetto and the present day
Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?”
No full textProject MUSE - Shakespeare Bulletin - Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?” Browse > Film, Theater, and Performing Arts > Theater and Performance Studies > Shakespeare Bulletin > Volume 28, Number 1, Spring 2010 Download PDF Unpinning Desdemona (Again) or “Who would be toll’d with Wenches in a shew?” Carol Chillington RutterUniversity of Warwick I take the quotation in my title from Thomas Tomkis’s “pleasant Comoedy,” Lingva, subtitled “Or, the Combat of the Tongue and the fiue Sences for Superiority,” offering the case of Tomkis’s irritably touchy Tactus as a preamble to thinking about Shakespeare’s Desdemona in Othello 4.3. Entering the combat to challenge “the Tongue” for sensory superiority, Tactus had planned to defeat his rival by bringing on a “sight of obiects” to “haue prou’d my worth.” “Wherefore,” he explains, “considering that of all the things / That please me most, women are counted chiefe,” Tactus “had thought to haue represented in [his] shew / The Queen of pleasure, Venus,” and then to have demonstrated the powerful, nay the superior, pleasures of touch by setting a male spectator stumbling after her, hands outstretched, trying to embrace her.1 But the shew-man’s plan has come unstuck. Constructing a theatrical Venus, he discovers, is as complicated a business as raising a Royal Exchange, organizing nearly as many factors to build the body as to..
Writing for actors : language that cues performance
No full textHamlet, Prince of Denmark, does it. Likewise, Peter Quince, carpenter of Athens. They write for actors. And writing for actors, they tell us something about how the playwright who’s written them writes for actors
Shakespeare performances in England 2014
No full text1 January 2014. A day for totting things up, drawing lines in ledgers, balancing accounts. A day, invited by the two-faced god, to look backwards and forwards. In my case, a day to look back over six years writing this annual survey as I prepare to hand it over, at the end of year seven, to my (as yet) unidentified successor. I'm looking at my review diary, counting the nights (and days) I've spent in the theatre: to date, 127 productions; 32 plays; lacking only Pericles, Cymbeline and the three parts of Henry VI to make up the full canon. I've seen nine Dreams, eight Hamlets, eight Tempests. These numbers were perhaps to be expected, not least because 2012 was reckoned to be The Tempest's anniversary year. More interesting to me, statistically, are the five Winter's Tales I've seen: clearly, this once-popular play, fallen for a couple of decades out of the regular repertoire, is firmly back in the theatre. Equally suggestive, I'd say, are the three All's Well That Ends Wells and three Troilus and Cressidas I've reviewed: plays that used to be neglected but now look to be performed as often as Romeo and Juliet (marking an interesting post-modern shift, perhaps, in the love stories our appetites turn to). Then there are the one-offs, the deeply under-performed plays any spectator is lucky to cross off her hit list: King John, Henry VIII and The Two Gentlemen of Verona. (Though I can see, looking ahead at my ‘What's On in 2014’ that the RSC, for the first time since 1998, is staging Two Gents, and on the main stage, where it hasn't appeared since 1981 when it was staged as half of a bizarre double bill with Titus Andronicus, both plays radically chopped to fit on either side of an interval. Not one of John Barton's better ideas.
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