Category: Shakespeare

Hamlet is one of those plays that you know is marvellous, but you also know is long. We haven’t seen it that often ‘in the flesh’ but we have DVDs with Kenneth Branagh, Maxine Peake and David Tennant. For some reason my wife chose the latter. It is the RSC production from 2009, and the actors had obviously played it on stage many, many times before it was filmed. Yet this is so fresh – almost as if they are playing it for the first time. Elsinore is somewhere in central Europe, the clothes are modern, and some of...

We watched The Winter’s Tale on a Saturday evening in March. I am writing this blog up on a snowy day in April. The version we watched was the one Jonathan Miller produced for the BBC in 1981. I remember going to a lecture he gave in Cambridge in the early 1980s – at that time he was regularly on television, often described as a “renaissance man”. The staging of this production is a long way from the Globe. The BFI’s review describes it as “one of the most daringly stylised productions of the entire project, its stripped-down approach...

I don’t know why it has taken several weeks before we got round to sitting and watching our next Shakespeare. “Romeo and Juliet” is one of those plays we are are convinced we know. We are sure we have seen it several times (though the only performance we can remember was one in Chester a few years ago). We know “West Side Story” very well. Julie did a while as an Supply Teacher in English, and had used Baz Luhrmann’s version in her lessons, so we watched that. I wasn’t really expecting anything like this. I assumed Mr Luhrmann...

“Have we ever seen this?” I asked the Oracle as we decided what we watch on a cold, frosty, lock-downed Saturday evening. “No” replied my wife. We pooled our collective knowledge of the play – “Falstaff is in it”. So we took ourselves to The Globe in 2010 to watch the production directed by Christopher Luscombe. The following day I read about the play and this production – my complete set of Globe DVDs has an information book too. They had put extra bits of staging in, which seemed a little bit complicated, but they used it well. It...

We continue to work our way, slowly, through the canon of Shakespeare’s plays, but when Julie said “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” I wasn’t very enthusiastic. We did it at school – my recorder ensemble provided the music – and have seen it many times. We did a version with our Performing Youth Group at St Edmundsbury Cathedral and Hannah was in a production in Durham which then toured the States. We have seen it in the Abbey Gardens in Bury St Edmunds, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, etc. It’s a lovely play, ideally outside on a summer evening (though...

As we’ve watched the last three plays in the BBC’s Hollow Crown series of 2012, it makes sense to do the same here – and it is good that the main characters are played by the same actors as before. This was directed by Thea Sharrock – she had had a lot of theatre experience, though this seems to have been the only thing she did for television. In the bonus film she talks about taking Tom Hiddlestone for a run and making him do the speeches as they ran – when she couldn’t hear him, she made him...

New Year’s Eve, so let’s lie on the sofa and go back to 1403, after the Battle of Shrewsbury. In this play we have the death of Henry IV, which didn’t actually happen until 1413, but who cares if we condense a decade into one play. Or perhaps I am just going back to when the play was written, probably sometime between 1596 and 1599. Even if we just go back to 2012 when “Hollow Crown” was produced as part of the BBC’s Olympic celebrations, I can’t help thinking that the world was a happier place eight years ago...

If memory serves, I did Henry IV part I for O level and part II for A level, but that was many years ago. Despite the passage of time I can still remember Miss Williamson and Mr Roberts, two of my English teachers. I think it was her first job out of College, while he had been teaching for many years. I remember writing essays on “Honour”, “Hal’s relationship with Falstaff”, and various other topics – indeed I was pleasantly surprised how much of the play I remembered. Julie doesn’t think we’ve ever seen it on stage. Henry IV...

We have several versions of “Richard II”, so we decided to watch the BBC Hollow Crown version of 2012, directed by Rupert Goold. I recognised St David’s Cathedral (where we had a lovely holiday when the kids were small), checked and found it was Pembroke Castle (last visited when I was a lad), and knew I’d seen the amazing topiary somewhere (Packwood House, visited last year). We are a long way from the stage of the Globe. Apparently the earliest recorded performance of Richard II was a private one, in Canon Row, the house of Edward Hoby, on 9 December 1595....

Since we are going to have a Christmas by ourselves, we are going to use the time to watch some of our large collection of Shakespeare DVDs. We have seen quite a lot of his plays since we first went to see “Macbeth” together forty years ago – and we had both seen a few before then. This might be the opportunity to watch the rest of them. We settled down on the afternoon of 16 December 2020. Today would have been Gareth’s 31st birthday, and he loved his Shakespeare. Our version of “Twelfth Night” was recorded for the...