The Northern Vicar Blog

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...