The late Robert Stephens, one of the most outstanding Lears
Judi Dench, a seasoned performer of Shakespeare
Posted on 07/13/2005 10:45:26 AM PDT by nickcarraway
Yesterday the RSC announced plans to perform all 37 of Shakespeare's plays in a single year, writes Charles Spencer
It has long seemed to me that there is almost no human thought, no human emotion that hasn't already been both experienced and unforgettably expressed by Shakespeare.
If you want to understand young love in all its delight and pain, you need look no further than Romeo and Juliet. For adulterous passion in middle age, turn to Antony and Cleopatra. Anyone who has ever experienced clinical depression knows that its symptoms have never been better described than by Hamlet; those who have endured state-sponsored terror will find their blood freezing in recognition during a performance of Macbeth.
And I'm sure that the families and lovers of those killed in the recent London bomb blasts are echoing, in their own less eloquent, but just as deeply felt words, two passages from King Lear. Pondering the evil of the bombers, they may well repeat Lear's anguished question: "Is there any cause in nature that makes these hard hearts?" A
nd considering the dreadful, meaningless waste of life of those who died underground, they must surely wonder, like Lear over the body of his beloved Cordelia: "Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life/And thou no breath at all?"
Coleridge was close to the mark when he spoke of the "unfathomable depths" of Shakespeare's "oceanic mind". Laurence Olivier went even further declaring that Shakespeare was "the nearest thing in incarnation to the eye of God". And though Olivier's remark might seem like extravagant "luvviespeak", I suspect that in our secular age, Shakespeare is as close as many of us come to apprehending the divine. He isn't just the poet of our nation, he is its historian, portraitist, philosopher, spiritual guide and conscience, too.
People sometimes ask me if I ever get tired of watching Shakespeare, and my honest answer is no. Conceited directors using Shakespeare as a springboard for their own egos and inadequate actors mangling the verse can often make Shakespearean productions a trial. But even the worst of them can't entirely obscure his greatness. In every production, however often you may have seen it before, you notice something new, spot yet another facet of Shakespeare's mysterious and inexhaustible artistic personality.
And now, for the first time, everything Shakepeare ever wrote is to be staged at a single, heroically ambitious event that blows a defiant raspberry at our dumbed-down culture. In the biggest undertaking its 45-year history, the Royal Shakespeare Company announced yesterday that it will be presenting The Complete Works - not just the 37 canonical plays, but also his sonnets and the long poems. It will be a unique opportunity to see Shakespeare steadily, and to see him whole.
The festival will feature not just the RSC itself, but other theatre companies from across the world and around the UK, and will run in Stratford-upon-Avon from April 2006 to April 2007. With the opening in July next year of the 1,000-seat Courtyard Theatre - which will become the RSC's temporary main stage when work starts in 2007 on a radical redesign of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre - there will be an audience capacity in Stratford of 2,800 theatregoers a night.
Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare is buried, will provide the setting for a production of Henry VIII. A new outdoor theatre, The Dell, is being planned in the RSC's riverside gardens, hosting work by amateur, school and student groups and the homeless people's company. Cardboard Citizens, will stage a reworked Timon of Athens, presented in a Stratford hotel.
Big names have already been announced. The RSC will stage 15 productions itself in the Complete Works festival and has already signed up some of Britain's finest Shakespearean actors. Home-grown highlights include Dame Judi Dench in a new musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor and Sir Ian McKellen playing King Lear in a production directed by Sir Trevor Nunn.
Patrick Stewart, meanwhile, having long left the Starship Enterprise, will play Prospero in The Tempest and appear alongside Harriet Walter in Antony and Cleopatra. The RSC will also launch a new cycle of Shakespeare's history plays.
Among visiting directors are the German Peter Stein, directing a British company of actors in Troilus and Cressida, Yukio Ninagawa with a Japanese version of that notorious gore-fest Titus Andronicus, and Janet Suzman staging a South African Hamlet.
The Anglo-Kuwaiti director Sulayman Al-Bassam directs an Arab Richard III, focusing on Saddam Hussein's early days as he murdered his way through the Ba'ath Party. Tim Supple will direct A Midsummer Night's Dream with a company of performers from India and Sri Lanka, and the Cheek by Jowl company will bring its Russian production of Twelfth Night to Stratford.
There will also be American productions of Henry IV, Love's Labour's Lost and The Merchant of Venice, the latter starring F Murray Abraham as Shylock. British companies will include Edward Hall's all-male Propeller ensemble performing The Taming of the Shrew, and fringe companies such as Kneehigh and Forkbeard Fantasy.
The RSC's artistic director, Michael Boyd, who has fought heroically to restore the fortunes of the long beleaguered RSC, hopes the festival will appeal equally to aficionados seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see all the plays, and to newcomers encountering his genius for the first time. "It will," he promises, "be a national knees-up for the RSC's house dramatist."
At Stratford for 12 months, all the world will be on stage, and all the men and women playing Shakespeare. I can hardly wait.
Will the conclusion include Saddam shrieking, "A rat hole! A rat hole! My kingdom for a rat hole!"
Sounds great!
Thank *** they're staging "Timon of Athens". ;')
The BBC produced all 37 plays back in the 1970s. Typically those can be found at bigger libraries with disk lending. The full set (I forget the company which DVD'd it, same as James Burke's "Connections" etc) costs the Earth, but there's a nice set of five popular tragedies available this week at the local Sam's Club; there's also a set of comedies. Maybe more. Alas, the tragedy set doesn't include Lear.
Anyway, that runs a mere $60.
Or Vortigern? ;')
http://www.allshakespeare.com/noble-kinsmen/38393
the 37 plays, with famous quotes:
http://www.1728.com/page10.htm
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