Bouncy Castles, Blast Furnaces, and Bill Nighy
Plus: Hat Shakespeare
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Quick Links
Tom Holland on “The Scottish Play” (more Hot Ones + Shakespeare)
I try not to let myself get hung up on superstition because I’m the type of person that can really really get sucked into it…Without trying to sound too much like a douchebag and too grandiose, I I love the feeling that you could die out there. I love the feeling that it could all fall apart. So, for me, I don’t like to tempt anything.
Andrew Garfield is playing Wat Tyler in a new film about the Peasants’ Revolt, featuring an exceptionally petulant 14 year-old Richard II.
30 years of Shakespeare on the Common + a Skivvie Puck2 + themed ice cream.
Of course, the reality of an outdoor stage in an urban park invites unscripted drama, like the time a fire started on stage during “Julius Caesar,” prompting another actor to grab a fire extinguisher and promptly put it out…
“Oskar Eustis, Theater Giant, Is Stepping Down. First, He Has Thoughts.”3
But there we go — we make history, but we do not make it in conditions of our own choosing, as Karl Marx once said.
The shows we never want to see again via Exeunt. Natasha Tripney is excellent on what I will now call, “Hat Shakespeare” (“There were so many excellent hats!”) +
I saw a company called something like Bouncy Castle Shakespeare do truncated productions of Hamlet and Macbeth on a bouncy castle and it was very rough in a lot of ways but I kind of thought there was something to it. I liked the use of a bouncy castle on top of the bouncy castle during the play within the play, and I sort of thought ‘they kind of have something?’ Then they did “Bouncy Castle Dracula” off their own script and it immediately became apparent that they were in fact terrible.
“I was really interested in doing an all-female Timon of Athens...”
No, there aren’t a bunch of newly minted Lancastrians running around Tanglewood.
The new PM “claims to have read all of William Shakespeare’s plays.”
Daniel Evans and Jonathan Groff on As You Like It.4
…we've given you a hint of what your costume [in Arden] is, which has some sheepskin trim and a school tie around your thigh.
If you’ll be in London August 29–31, go visit the first Twelfth Night venue.
"Get, Set, Romeo and Juliet!"5
Throughout the show, actors encourage the kids to root for their "team," by chanting, "Give 'em a 'woo' for Montague," and "Ready, set, Capulet."
50 Plays by Women+ Over 50 includes Professor Sycorax.
William Shakespeare’s Reservoir Dogs in Melbourne, The Merry Wives of Windsor Cove6 in SoCal, and The Tempest at a blast furnace in Pittsburgh.
“Becoming Hamlet is a participatory theater experience where you step into the role of Hamlet.”
Bill Nighy on Jane Austen and Shakespeare:
…it’s like Shakespeare, I don’t do Shakespeare. I mean, I know he’s the greatest poet that ever walked the Earth, but the performing of it, I’ll leave to other people, because I can’t – I have no real enthusiasm for the challenges of the iambic pentameter.
Jonathan Bate on Simon Forman on Autolycus as a “colt pixie” and Julie Taymor’s Titus:
Anthony Hopkins, who plays the part, describes it as “King Lear meets Hannibal Lecter”.
How to make the headline, “We Found a Tree” mildly more interesting.
Nepo baby cast in an “iconic” role, unclear what, maybe Midsummer-ish, maybe in Edinburgh?7 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
…McCallum’s “King Lear” provides one of those perspective shifts in a wordless opening sequence, during which the widower king loses his queen, a woman that Shakespeare’s text never mentions. As Rhoads first strides into the stage space from outside, a robed female figure stays behind at the edge of the greensward, gazing at the dreaming river.
Charismatic leader Father Lear has grown his church from a traveling music show into a major broadcast and cable network, thanks to the effort and charms of his daughters, the Lear Sisters.
“What shifts when one of theatre’s best-known tragic heroes becomes a heroine? …not much.”
“[Christopher Nolan] recommended a film by Kurasawa called Ran, that inspired him and I watched it and I could see exactly what he was saying.”
Q: Is there a particular sentence that has stayed with you throughout your life?
A: I love the sentence as a form, and try to hold on to as many as I can, despite an increasingly porous memory. But if I’m allowed to choose two? They’re from Glendower’s conversation with Hotspur in Henry IV Part 1, and contain so much of what I write about: “I can call spirits from the vasty deep.” “Why, so can I, or so can any man, / But will they come when you do call for them?”
“A new drama centered on Chicago’s first Black mayor is coming to the Lookingglass Theatre. Titled “Prince Hal,” a riff on a famous character in William Shakespeare’s “Henry IV…”
Shakespeare in Pope’s Iliad in Homer Haunted via Henry Oliver.
...the arms of the Trojan warriors, umbered by the fire, recall the scene around the campfires on the night before Agincourt, as described in Henry V: ‘Fire answers fire, and through their paly flames/Each battle sees the other’s umbered face.’
Recommendations
“…their rarity combined with a rising demand for their meat has pushed prices to a level approaching those of cocaine.”
The Fish Pirate’s Daughter, Ketchikan’s annual musical melodrama.
Atherstone Ball Game rules: “Stay on Long Street” + “Don’t kill anyone”
“When the director of a passion play offered to nail Bautista to a cross in the name of empirical authenticity, the anthropologist declined.”
© 2026 Kate Pitt. All rights reserved. No reproduction without permission.
Like this one.
Also “Heated Rivalry” and the 2019 all-female Taming.
Like the “sliding doors” R&J but interactive.
“Skateboard Fenton” is a nice change from “Motorcycle Fenton” where the actor enters on a Harley in a desperate attempt to give him anything interesting to play.^ (He’s a bad boy! Get it?) Alas, it may be hopeless. There may be more thankless parts in the canon but not many.
^*vroom* “See where he comes” Romeo is still very funny though.
In other Edinburgh news, someone has made an incredible useful website. (obligatory Onion)
I'm stealing this line for the next time somebody wants my "take" on a Shakespeare play: "A better gimmick is to have all the company learn the play really, really well and perform it clearly, creatively and with intelligence."