The Complete Works Festival Part 4:

The highlights among the visiting companies

Gwen HERAT in Stratford-Upon-Avon

DRAMA: The Baxter theatre Centre of South Africa will present Hamlet directed by Janet Suzma with Veneshram Arumugam in the title role, John Kani as Claudius and Dorothy-Anne Gould as Gertrude. This is their only UK performance.

A British company of actors in a new production directed by Peter Stein will showcases Troilus and Cressida in association with Edinborough International Festival.

Yokio Ninagawa brings his Japanese version on Andronicus to the Royal Shakespeare Trust. Munchner Kammerspiele presents another UK version of Othello directed by the Belgium director, Luke Pereceval with Thomas Thieme in the title role.

Sulaymen Al-Bassaam from Kuwait will present his version of Richard III focusing on Sadam Hussain's early days as a secular Arab hero before he assasinaed his way through the Ba'ath party.

A Midsummer Night's Dream is directed by Tim Supple with a company of performers drawn from India and Sri Lanka. The production makes its UK premiere at the Festival.

Jowel's Russian version of Twelfth Night will take a bow at Stratford. And from the United States, Chicago Shakespeare Theatre will board Henry IV with Barbara Guinnes directing the play. This will be their first visit to the UK.

Michael Kahan will direct Love's Labour Lost for the Washington Shakespeare while the Theatre for the New Audience will present the Merchant of Venice with Murray Abraham as Shylock and the Tiny Ninja Theatre will board Hamlet at the Festival. These are only a handful of the visiting companies that will be involved with the Complete Works Festival.

Most plays debut at the magnificent new building especially built in time for the festival, called the Courtyard Theatre with seating capacity of 1,000. This opened in July this year.

The new temporary theatre built adjoining the other place, allows for an increase of 2,800 theatre-goers at night in the Courtyard Theatre at Stratford and will continue as the company's main theatre when work starts in 2007 on the transformation of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre.

The Merchant of Venice

This is Shakespeare's controversial comedy of religious conflict. The Merchant of Venice may have been written by the summer of 1598 as it was entered in the Stationers' Registry on 22nd July the same year by printer James Roberts. It is also mentioned in Francis Mere's Palladis Tamia soon afterwards.

The play could not have been more than two years old then as it contain an allusion to the 'wealthy Andrew dock'd in sand' which has been accepted as a reference to San Andres, a Spanish ship captured during the expedition to Cadiz in 1596.

News of this exploit reached court by 30 July 1596. So Shakespeare could not have written the Merchant of Venice before that date. The play brings together two widely known folk tales.

The story of the pound of flesh and the story of the three caskets, a number of the play's most important elements were already were present in the Florentine writer, Ser Givonni's version of the pound of flesh plot. It was a story known as Gienneto of Venice and the Lady Belmont.

This play is yet another of Shakespeare's tragi-comedies telling the story of aimless love in the middle of a futile war.

It was probably created in late 1601 as the prologue makes reference to the Earl of Essex who had been executed for treason early that year.

Troilus and Cressida is set in the city of Troy and the camp of the besieging Greek army during the Trojan War. For ten years the Greek army had been encamped outside the walls of Troy.

The seige was getting nowhere because the Greek commanders egged by the sardonic Ulysses and

This play of the Bard has been variously described as powerful moral drama and wickedly comic' and 'strangely tender. It falls in to the same play category as All's Well That Ends Well. It can be neither easily be classified as a comedy nor tragedy.

For the play, Shakespeare chose his setting Vienna; where the rulers, Duke Vincentio hands over his powers to his deputy Lord Angelo and departs.

The city is a hotbed of sexual licence and the morality new rules mounts a crackdown which leads to a young gentleman, Claudio facing the death sentence for making Juliet his fiancee pregnant.

Many incidents follow to make the play a magnificent epic, staged many times around the world and filmed. A new version takes its bow for The Complete Works Festival. All these plays keep rotating until March next year.

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