#MindTheBard: round-up

Well then. I think it’s safe to say that this particular challenge week didn’t go according to plan! I did do a Shakespeare thing every day, to be fair, and this was the first challenge week to head outside of London for the last couple of shows – so that’s an achievement. I was on […]

#MindTheBard: A Summer of Dreams

“What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” A plethora of productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, that’s what! Yes, every year it seems that one or other of Shakespeare’s plays is the one to get your teeth into, and this summer that honour appears to have fallen on the much-loved comedy with fairies and mechanicals. At […]

#MindTheBard: Shakespeare’s Rose Theatre

Stratford-upon-Avon and London may be the best known links to Shakespeare, with major theatres in each dedicated to performing his works, but now York is beginning to associate itself with the Bard. Last year a popup replica of the Rose Theatre arrived in York, and it has made its return for a second season this […]

Day 7: Playing Shakespeare

William Shakespeare continues to be one of the most influential figures in literature & the arts, with his birthplace Stratford-upon-Avon a popular tourist destination (as well as the home of the Royal Shakespeare Company). He has reached out into our daily lives, as many words & phrases that he included in his works still figure […]

Day 6: Understanding Shakespeare

As audience members, we generally only see one side of a Shakespeare production: the end result. But how do companies get to that point? In a bid to understand the creative process that goes into developing a Shakespeare production, I talked to Robert Myles – actor for Merely Theatre (amongst others), dramaturg, and creator of […]

Day 5: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Bridge Theatre)

They say that you can wait for ages for one London bus and then two come along at once – the same could be said for Shakespeare plays. Granted, you don’t often have to wait for a certain selection of them, but you’re pretty much guaranteed to get at least two different productions within a […]

Day 4: Othello: Remixed

“O, beware, my lord, of jealousy! It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on.” The obvious focus for productions of Othello is the race angle, given the title character’s isolation from the rest of the play’s personnel. However, there are plenty of other themes that run through the heart of […]

Day 3: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre)

The problem with classic plays is that you do kind of need to reinvent them every once in a while; there are some people who I know would be happy seeing basically the same thing trotted out time after time, but most of us need some variety. Shakespeare is a big feature here, as you […]

Day 2: “By your leave, wax…”

In our age of email, WhatsApp and recorded delivery post, we take the security of messages we send rather lightly. But have you ever considered the lengths people had to go to in the days before the envelope was introduced? Yes, this humble paper contraption only started to be used on a wide scale from […]

Day 1: “Frailty, thy name is woman”

Ever since I started frequenting the Globe in 2016 and ramped up my Shakespeare intake, I’ve found myself embroiled in arguments over casting – more specifically, gender switches. I know I should leave well alone in the majority of cases, but it can be really hard not to challenge some of the ignorance people spout; […]