Mockumentaries, Jack the Ripper, and “Pursued by bear” wine
November Shakespeare News
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November Shakespeare News
As promised, November’s roundup is below, look out for December tomorrow, and new news on Monday. If you are near NYC, come to a reading of Timon of Athens I’m directing for The Acting Company on Monday, January 26.
Quick Links
Barbara Broccoli’s first post-Bond project is an Othello “adapted from” Sam Gold’s 2016 production. David Oyelowo and Rachel Brosnahan return, Cynthia Erivo joins as Emilia,2 and everyone flies to Qatar. (context)
The RSC’s Glaswegian pub thug Macbeth. (Not Sam Heughan’s first Shakespeare)
Several minor characters – including Old Man and two Doctors – are combined in a single Catholic priest, justified by the text’s use of the honorific “father” for seniors…
Robert Icke will direct Sadie Sink and Noah Jupe in Romeo and Juliet.
“I was stabbed in the back with a real knife while performing Julius Caesar.” (‘twas ever thus)
A documentary about Shakespeare in an Armenian retirement home.
Walter Isaacson on Steve Jobs on Lear.
Isaacson asks Jobs to explain how he transformed from a conventional suburban kid to a driver of change. Jobs responds by crediting his teenage encounter with William Shakespeare’s King Lear. Isaacson, naturally, is fascinated: “I asked [Jobs] why he related to King Lear… but he didn’t respond to the connection I was making, so I let it drop.”
I want YOU to volunteer to design and costume an elementary school student production of “Macbeth” set in 1500’s MesoAmerica.
Leave the possets to Lady M, please.
Staff members made medieval hot possets based on a recipe found in a book in the library. Possets are basically cream, egg, spices, and white wine…One of the fellows I only vaguely knew by sight got extremely drunk. He broke the thermostat off the wall, looked at it confusedly, and then in what I can only describe as ‘a Mr. Bean-esque fashion’ stuck it back on the wall…
An As You Like It-themed season announcement from American Players.
A very green (eyed?) Othello suit (more) (even more)3
“Most of my anger was formulated in volume and aggression. I think I just screamed at her for two-and-a-half-hours.” With the wisdom of the years passed, he’s able to look at Shakespeare’s words with an appreciation for the full depth of their intention. “It isn’t just rage – it’s loss, it’s hurt, it’s self-loathing, it’s insecurity, it’s vulnerability. Anybody who’s been in a loving relationship or a marriage knows that when you do have arguments, they’re not a full-tilt 10 – they’re twos and threes and then nothing and then twos and fives and then nothing. It’s a kaleidoscope of emotion.”
Sara Holdren on Tom Stoppard. (archive)
Until Saturday, I would have told you that no living writer wove through the warp threads of my life with as much tensile strength, or as much influence on the pattern, as Tom Stoppard. Today, his thread runs alongside those of Chekhov and Shakespeare, Dickens and Eliot, E. M. Forster and Lloyd Alexander.
“Theatre is a public event holding limitless private possibilities.”
Michael Urie on Shakespeare and Oh, Mary! and the parts he still wants to play. (Bottom, Benedick, Berowne)
“The same things that elicit a laugh in a comedy like Oh, Mary! are the things that we can [use to] elicit laughter in Shakespeare, even when it’s not funny. I’ve been in Shakespeare plays—Hamlet. There’s some funny stuff in Hamlet.”
A new Capulet ballet with dancing suits of armor.
In this story, Lady Capulet’s grief is romantically charged, due to an affair she’s been carrying on with Tybalt since discovering Lord Capulet in the tender embrace of Count Paris.
Were all those “haths” and “doths” pronounced as “has” and “does”?
The Aaron Play “picks up right where Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus left off.”
Buzz Goodbody’s nephew is in a two-hand “radical reworking of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar.” (more via Fergus Morgan)
A Keanu scholar on “My Own Private Idaho”
Mr. Reeves was simultaneously playing the role in several styles, including naturalistically as well as “delivering Shakespeare with a valley-dude perspective.” “When people aren’t familiar with Brechtian’s strategic strategies in the theater they think that’s bad acting,” he concluded. “Well no. It’s a choice.”
“Hal Prince used to say – said once – that if he saw The Acting Company on someone’s resume he would trust that they could do anything.” -Margot Harley, “the other scariest woman in the world.”
A “dark,” “sexed-up Narnia” Midsummer at the Wanamaker. (“forgeries”)
Robin Starveling, usually the most mocked of the Rude Mechanicals, doesn’t exist here; instead Puck takes his place, contorting on and offstage like the Emcee from Cabaret…
“What is it like to play a role like [Orsino], where disability isn’t the focus of the character?”
On young Richard’s Burbage’s choice of weapon: “Was it truly a foretaste of Dada, or was the broom simply the implement closest to hand?”
A “joyless, weird, creepy, barely comprehensible and thoroughly unpleasant” Taming that “tortures the play itself, crushing its comical spirit and reducing its already-thin characters to something less than human.” (counterpoint)
Conan Doyle goes on a Jack the Ripper LARP with snarky Shakespeareans.
The Shakespeare scholar on the tour, John Churton Collins, joked that even…Caliban “would have turned up his nose at this.”
Isaac Butler on Dark Renaissance, The Dream Factory, and Greenblatt’s “scholarship as tautology.”
What I most remember is that this incredibly wise teacher once said, “I don't understand a certain portion of the play”. And none of my teachers had ever said that. And the fact that there was an enigma that he couldn’t understand had a powerful effect on me for reasons I can’t explain.
“It was from Doctor Faustus that the author of Hamlet and Macbeth learned how it could be done.”
Pauline Phelps 1901 play A Shakespearean Conference (1901) features a group of characters “discussing how to get more people to come see their plays.”
Why Kyle MacLachlan’s wine is called “Pursued by Bear.”
Bear, to us, embodies the similarities between the time-honored crafts of acting and winemaking.
Recommendations
“I want you to slide a feather between this word and another.”
“Mrs. Abdul Hamid has not invited Mrs. William Hohenzollern to a pink tea.”
“How am I supposed to focus on my day job, book writing and book-chapter-for-someone-else-writing when there’s Edwardian lady wrestlers slash brothel keepers slash money forgers out there to be found?”
Like this one.
The willow song reprise will be fire.
There’s an discussion of having a drama therapist in the rehearsal room + some historic bad behavior:
FitzGerald tells us a story she’d heard about Laurence Olivier and Maggie Smith when they did Othello at the Old Vic in 1964; Smith apparently grew so fed up with Olivier’s diva behaviour that during one of their fight scenes she dragged her fingers down his black-painted face, so that Olivier had to perform the rest of it looking like a kid with tiger face paint. I tell them of another tale I’d heard in which Olivier, displeased with Smith off stage, had smacked her so hard during one scene that she saw stars. “And that is exactly what happens when you don’t have a drama therapist!” exclaims FitzGerald.