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.
Troilus and Cressida: Despairing Troilus and Wise Ulisses
from a 1954 production.
|
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.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE: Actors dressed in 18th century
costumes
|
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. |