#blanche mcintyre

[heyho-simonrussellbeale]

The Invention of Love rehearsal photos!

Photos by Helen Murray.

Thanks @josbenharis for pointing me in the right direction!

[pers-books]

Hey, Bard Nerds, this looks AMAZING!

 17 September – 6.30 PM

 Globe Theatre

Prices: £120.00 - £10.00

In honour of the 400th anniversary of the First Folio, we gather in the Globe Theatre for an ultra-live experiment, to recreate Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night for one night only.

The First Folio is a collection of (almost) all the Shakespeare plays that we know of, and one of the most influential books ever published. Without it, many of Shakespeare’s most loved plays, including Twelfth Night, would have been lost forever.

In Shakespeare’s times, often actors had no access to the whole play script. Instead, they were given their lines on a scroll or a roll of paper (literally their role), with a few words that would be their cue: hence cue-script. They also didn’t have the weeks of rehearsal that we are used to now. For the most part, each actor would go away, learn their lines, learn their cues, and then turn up at the theatre ready to go.

Just the play, the players, and the most important character of all: you, the audience.

Now, 400 years later, we will attempt to do the same. Directed by Blanche McIntyre (Measure for Measure, 2022), a host of familiar faces are primed to learn their lines, familiarise their cues and step courageously into the unknown on the stage of our glorious wooden ‘O’. All you need to do is join us for a night that promises to be spontaneous, revelatory, and celebratory!

A Folio 400 special performance.

‘When my cue comes call me’

– A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Act IV, scene 1

[peterviney1]

The Merry Wives of Windsor - RSC 2024 review

The second review from the RSC this week. It’s Blanche McIntyre’s directed THE MERRY WIVES OF WINDSOR, (follow link). This is the normal modern day setting, but it’s even set right now in the football Euros (peripherally). John Hodgkinson is a towering Falstaff in more ways than one. It’s modern suburban England. For me it’s a favourite comedy, enjoying another wonderful version.

[shakespearenews]

Nonetheless, McIntyre explains, “intractable problems, both of situation and personality, make for juicy drama. You go to watch people going through things that you can’t imagine going through.” In All’s Well (“famously the play where you don’t like anyone”), the biggest stumbling block is a moral one – Helena, the heroine, beds her crush Bertram by convincing him he’s having sex with someone else. “The idea of a bed trick is ethically questionable,” McIntyre protests. “It’s essentially a sexual assault: Bertram can’t consent because he doesn’t know who he’s sleeping with. But the play has no problem with the bed trick. The play thinks it’s fine; it even cheers her on.”

She refuses to skate over this “appalling” moment. “When the world of the play contains this poisonous central act, I cannot excuse it to the audience. It’s a play about incredibly flawed people who do awful things to each other, and this is the worst of many.” 

[willstafford]

Well?

ALL’S WELL THAT ENDS WELL Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Wednesday 7th August, 2022 Everyone knows the title of Shakespeare’s late comedy (characters even say it as part of their dialogue) but fewer people are familiar with the story it tells.  The play isn’t performed as often as Much Ado, Twelfth Night and As You Like It, so every new production has a head start in delivering something…

[theworldofotps]

Well damn okay I see how it is, ending me with this beautiful piece😍

Morning Kindle

In your groggy state of waking up, you heard the door to your chamber open and close quietly. It could only be your king returning. It must’ve been a little late in the morning if he was coming to see if you had woken by now. Meaning it was time to rise for the day.

Keep reading

[globefan]

WINTER SEASON ANNOUNCEMENT!

Measure for Measure, directed by Blanche McIntyre

Hamlet featuring the globe ensemble, directed by Sean Holmes

The Merchant of Venice, directed by Abigail Graham

The Fir Tree, by Hans Christian Andersen, new version by Hannah Khalil

October sees Telling Tales back for autumn

And there's going to be £5 standing tickets!

Advanced priority booking: 3rd sept

Priority booking: 9th sept

Public booking: 16th sept

More details here

[heyho-simonrussellbeale]

Having played parts from Prospero to Stalin, Hamlet and now the poet AE Housman, Simon Russell Beale is convinced he has one of the best jobs in the world. Why? Every new role offers a new area for intellectual investigation, not least when he gets to take on the logical arguments and ‘linguistic fireworks’ of one of his friend Tom Stoppard’s plays, he tells Fergus Morgan

You cannot complete acting – but if you could, Simon Russell Beale would be coming close. Over a three-decade career, he has taken on dozens of classic roles in canonical plays: Konstantin in The Seagull, Ferdinand in The Duchess of Malfi, Oswald in Ghosts, Lopakhin in The Cherry Orchard, Scrooge in A Christmas Carol, the title characters of Edward II, John Gabriel Borkman and Uncle Vanya, and loads more.

And, when it comes to Shakespeare, there are few parts the 63-year-old has not played. Hamlet? Tick. King Lear? Tick. Macbeth? Tick. Richard II and Richard III? Tick, tick. Benedick, Iago, Malvolio, Leontes? Tick, tick, tick, tick. Falstaff and Prospero? Tick, tick.

With a theatrical résumé as comprehensive as that, where does Russell Beale go next? In a recent interview with the Telegraph to mark the release of A Piece of Work, the memoir he “slightly sheepishly” wrote, the actor said he would be keen on playing Cleopatra. Why not? It would not be his first foray into gender-swapped Shakespeare: he played both Hippolyta in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Desdemona in Othello as a schoolboy.

“Unfortunately, I wasn’t being serious,” Russell Beale says. “I was being facetious, although I did see Mark Rylance do it 20 years ago and it was sensational. It is one of the great parts, but I don’t think that would work. It would probably be too scary for the audience.

“I would love to do Falstaff on stage as I’ve only done that on film,” he continues. “I would like to do another King Lear. I wasn’t particularly happy with my Macbeth, so I’d quite like to do that again one day. I’m getting a bit old now, though, so it has become slightly difficult. Perhaps one day I should try my hand at directing. I don’t know, really.”

Before he has a go at directing, or revisits Lear, or has a stab at Cleopatra, Russell Beale will be playing poet AE Housman in Blanche McIntyre’s revival of Tom Stoppard’s The Invention of Love at Hampstead Theatre in north London. Our interview is taking place via Zoom, with Russell Beale – black jumper, big beard – sat in an office somewhere inside the Swiss Cottage venue.

“There’s a very good novel here about Booth, the man who assassinated Lincoln,” Russell Beale remarks, browsing the bookshelves in front of him. “Anyway, nice to meet you.”

Russell Beale’s pre-interview bookshelf inspection confirms what he subsequently says about his character, about his approach to playing parts and about his professional motivations. He is, first and foremost, driven by an insatiable intellectual curiosity. He once described acting as “three-dimensional literary criticism”.

“I have one of the best jobs in the world, really,” he says. “Every single project potentially offers a new area of study. I know that sounds sort of dry, but if someone says: ‘I’d like you to do a play about a poet in the late 19th century who also happened to be the greatest classical scholar of his time,’ I think: ‘Wow.’ And, for a very short period of time, I get to become a bit of an expert on AE Housman.

“Or take Samuel Foote,” he continues, referencing the 18th-century actor and title character of Ian Kelly’s play Mr Foote’s Other Leg, which he played at Hampstead in 2015. “Doctor Johnson called Foote the most famous man in England, but I’d never heard of him. Now I could tell you all about him – where he lived, how he was arrested for sodomy and the legal case that followed. That sort of intellectual buzz is, I think, the most interesting thing of all about acting.”

Different jobs have different intellectual appeals, says Russell Beale. Some plays are stimulating for their historical subject matter. Shakespearean work is all about “digging around in this incredibly complicated, malleable script to find the emotional life of a character”. Other projects are attractive on a conceptual level, he says, like Joe Hill-Gibbins’ drastically cut, fast-forwarded staging of Richard II at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2018.

“I was far too old to play Richard II,” Russell Beale says. “I’d sort of assumed that was one part I would never do. Then along came this director who wanted to do it in a completely different way. It was incredibly cut down. It was staged straight-through with all the other characters milling around on stage. That was the challenge there.”

From screen to Stoppard

Where, then, does Russell Beale’s work in film and television fit in, beyond boosting his bank balance? His screen CV is not as formidable as his theatrical résumé, but it still encompasses Armando Iannucci’s comedy The Death of Stalin, the latest series of HBO’s blockbuster House of the Dragon, and the forthcoming Downton Abbey film.

“I suppose I just do that for fun, although I do have an interest in how those projects work,” Russell Beale says. “Take House of the Dragon. I remember wondering how they physically achieve a show like that. That was intriguing to me. I thought: ‘How the hell do you do a great big castle in a thunderstorm?’ It was this huge set with water literally cascading down the walls. The sheer skill was extraordinary. That was fascinating.”

If any writer could satisfy Russell Beale’s voracious intellectual appetite, it is Stoppard, whose plays frequently dazzle with their virtuosic use of history and intertextuality. Think of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, his existential 1966 riff on Hamlet that echoes Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. Or 1972’s metaphysical murder-mystery Jumpers, perhaps the most philosophically and athletically gymnastic play ever written.

Those Stoppard plays are the only two that Russell Beale has performed in until now. He played Guildenstern at the National Theatre in 1995, having previously performed in the play as a teenager, then took on the lead role in Jumpers – the philosopher George Moore – at the same venue in 2003. That production transferred to New York, and provided Russell Beale’s Broadway debut. The New York Times critic Ben Brantley hailed a “dazzling” performance of “sharp inventiveness and peerless emotional depth”.

“I’ve only done two Stoppard plays, but I’ve always been quite fierce in defending him against accusations of being over-intellectualised,” Russell Beale says. “Stoppard is intellectual, of course. He plays intellectual games. But what Stoppard always comes down to is people feeling passionate about something, usually another person. That, I think, is fundamentally the most important thing about his writing.

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is about two men who are lost in a world they don’t understand,” he continues. “Jumpers is about trying to cling on to a broken marriage. I saw The Real Thing recently at the Old Vic, which I saw with the great Stephen Dillane a couple of decades ago. That play is more directly about love than anything else.”

Playing with words

The Invention of Love, which premiered at the National in 1997, begins in the afterlife. Housman, dead at 77 in 1936, stands on the bank of the mythical river Styx, preparing to board a ferry. The play then unfolds through Housman’s memories of his time studying classics at the University of Oxford, with the older Housman – played by Russell Beale – interacting with his younger self, played by Matthew Tennyson. At the heart of its fizzing academic ideas is Housman’s unrequited love for fellow scholar Moses Jackson.

“The play is very complicated,” says Russell Beale. “This morning, we were rehearsing this very elaborate scene with all these 19th-century academics playing croquet. Stoppard ties in so many references to Victorian cultural icons like Jerome K Jerome and Henry Liddell and Lewis Carroll, too. Everyone has these great arias about philosophy and art.

“Underneath that, though, it is about an old man remembering his love for another man,” Russell Beale continues. “It is about a particular event in their lives, a rowing trip on the river when they were both at Oxford. It is about memory. It is about what you do with a love like that. It is about what a love like that means at the end of your life.”

The “incredible enjoyable” challenge of performing the play, says Russell Beale, is really getting to grips with its intellectual complexities and “linguistic fireworks” – as is the case with most Stoppard plays. If you can master the tongue-twisting dialogue and head-scratching arguments, he says, then the profoundly emotional core of the drama will come.

“Years ago, I remember the actor John Wood, who was one of the great language magicians, talking about Bernard Shaw,” Russell Beale says. “Now, I don’t particularly like Bernard Shaw, but Wood said that if you observe all the punctuations that Bernard Shaw set down as indications of when to breathe and so on, he does the work for you. “It is sort of like that with Stoppard,” Russell Beale continues.

“It is like a technical exercise. You have to end the sentence when it ends and make sure you give yourself gaps to breathe. And then it is about the clarity of the argument. The play does explore emotion. The word ‘love’ is in the title, after all. But performing it is not an emotional thing. It is more about a series of arguments. If you can get the grammatical, syntactical construction of the sentences, and then the actual logic of the argument, then you are on your way.”

It helps, says Russell Beale, that director McIntyre read classics at Oxford herself.

“My God, she does know what she is talking about,” he says. “I have no idea what I’m talking about when it comes to Latin or Greek, but she does have that string to her bow.”

The admiration is mutual. Via email, McIntyre says that she finds Russell Beale “extraordinary”.

“I think he is our greatest living Stoppardian actor,” she writes. “The wit and depth of feeling he brings to the character are breathtaking. It’s a privilege to watch him work.”

It helps, too, that Russell Beale is friends with Stoppard, who turned 87 this year. In fact, he adds, he received a first-hand insight into the playwright’s process of putting The Invention of Love together nearly 30 years ago when performing at the National. “I met Tom, I think, when we did Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” Russell Beale says. “My memory is that he was writing, or thinking about writing, The Invention of Love at the time, because I remember he gave me a lift home once because he was driving in the same direction, and he started talking about Oscar Wilde and Housman on the way.

“I’ve known Tom for years now,” Russell Beale adds. “He was in last week, actually. He was on great form. He likes revisiting his plays, I think. He reads the script very intently, as if he is rediscovering it. It is rather lovely to see him do that. It’s quite moving, actually.”

Russell Beale was born in Penang in what was then Malaya – now Malaysia – in January 1961, one of six children of military physician Peter Beale, who would later become the British Army’s surgeon general, and his wife Julia, who was also a doctor. He was sent to boarding school, first at St Paul’s Cathedral School, where he was a chorister, then at Bristol’s Clifton College.

It was there that Russell Beale first discovered his love for performance, both theatrical and musical – he is an accomplished pianist, oboist and singer, and frequently presents radio and television shows about classical music. He has often credited a stern English teacher called Brian Worthington with instilling in him that respect for intellectual rigour and academic curiosity.

He went on to study English at the University of Cambridge, where he threw himself into student drama and made friends with Tilda Swinton, then trained at Guildhall, initially as a singer before switching to acting, graduating in 1983.

He started his professional career at Edinburgh’s Traverse Theatre, but his big break came two years later with a role in Women Beware Women at London’s Royal Court, alongside a young Gary Oldman. It was not until 1991, however, five years into his long relationship with the Royal Shakespeare Company, that Russell Beale felt like he could fully express himself on stage, when he was cast as Konstantin in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull staged by the company’s director Terry Hands.

“Until then, I’d done a lot of comic parts,” Russell Beale says. “That was the first time somebody said: ‘No, you can do something serious. You can play someone with an emotional life that is serious.’ Terry did it deliberately, I think. He thought: ‘Here’s this guy who is being typecast and I’m going to cast him against type.’ And that changed my life. It led to people suggesting I do Hamlet and other stuff. I am enormously grateful to him.”

It was Hands, too, who forged one of the great collaborations of Russell Beale’s career, with director Sam Mendes. The pair first worked together at the RSC in the 1990s on productions of Troilus and Cressida, Richard III and The Tempest, then at the National Theatre on Othello in 1997 and, at the Donmar Warehouse, King Lear in 2014 and Twelfth Night in 2002, as well as on the globe-trotting production of The Lehman Trilogy in 2019.

“Sam and I have been doing stuff together for 30 years and it was Terry that put us together,” Russell Beale says. “Sam actually called me when Terry died in 2020. I was in the dressing room for The Lehman Trilogy in New York. He was very emotional. He told me Terry had died and that he was the one who had originally put us together. Terry was the one who said to Sam: ‘I think you’d like that actor over there.’”

There is an alternate reality in which Hands never cast Russell Beale as Konstantin in The Seagull and Russell Beale continued working as a comic actor. He would no doubt have been successful – witness his hilarious turn as spymaster Lavrenti Beria in The Death of Stalin – but he would not have plumbed the remarkable depths he has in this world.

What makes him stand out as an actor – and what has earned him countless accolades, including three Olivier awards, two BAFTAs, a Tony and a knighthood – is his ability to incarnate familiar characters in unexpected ways. He has played the majority of the most famous roles in the classical canon, but his interpretations are always invested with a distinct air of isolation or awkwardness. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that he has frequently approached those roles at an unconventional age.

“In retrospect, my career sort of looks like this marvellous plan, but it wasn’t,” he says. “It was all an accident. I’ve done all the parts at the wrong age. I was a very old Hamlet and a very old Benedick, and a very young Richard III and a very old Richard III.”

Empathy with outsiders

Nicholas Hytner, another director with whom Russell Beale has a long relationship, having starred in his stagings of The Alchemist, Much Ado About Nothing and Collaborators at the National Theatre in 2006, 2007 and 2011 respectively, and, more recently his versions of A Christmas Carol and John Gabriel Borkman at the Bridge Theatre in 2020 and 2022, has said of Russell Beale: “He has extraordinary empathy with outsiders, the wounded, the foolish, the warped and the lonely. He hears their music and can sing it.”

“What did he say?” asks Russell Beale. “I’ve not heard that before. That is the most beautiful, lovely thing to say. And yes, I’m always excited by those characters. The most interesting parts are those that are looking in from the outside or confused about their position. I don’t know what that says about me. I’ve never interrogated it. I refuse to.” 

If Russell Beale does not interrogate his own interest in playing isolated, uncomfortable characters on stage, does he ever interrogate theatre’s wider role in society? “That’s a very interesting question,” he says. “I suppose it is always in the back of your mind. Perhaps theatre is a bit of a sideshow now, although Wicked has just been turned into a film, for God’s sake. The biggest movie of the year started as a theatre show. Perhaps theatre only has a relevance when it is adapted into a medium now.

“No, I don’t think that, actually,” he adds. “That implies it is all about numbers, that something is only important if a lot of people see it. I don’t believe that. I still believe theatre has weight and relevance. I suppose I would fall back on the Tom Stoppard argument in The Invention of Love: ‘There is no little too little to be worth having.’”

[all-allam]

Roger Allam, Stephen Fry, Blanche McIntyre and John Jencks at The Hippopotamus Q&A hosted by Mark Kermode, live from the Hay Festival (28th May 2017 - courtesy of @HippoTheMovie on twitter). 

[bacchic-mischief]

Hymn by Lolita Chakrabarti Dir. Blanche McIntyre

2.18.2021

“What do I tell her?”  “The truth- that’s all that’s left.” 

[peterviney1]

Bartholomew Fair – review Review of BARTHOLOMEW FAIR by Ben Jonson (follow link). Ben Jonson's 1614 play was an innovative city comedy with a dizzying number of characters and events at London's annual fair / orgy which ran for hundreds of years. Modern dress production in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. Read the linked review.

[goodticklebrain]

Q&A August: Christy Burgess of the Robinson Shakespeare Company

It’s the final week of Q&A August! Let me take  you back to 2016, to my first ever Shakespeare Theatre Association conference, hosted by Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana. It was the last day, and the morning’s warm-up session was being conducted by Christy Burgess and the Robinson Shakespeare Company, a community Shakespeare program for school-aged kids.  After several rounds of fun theatre games, Christy asked her students if any of them wanted to perform some Shakespeare for this objectively intimidating roomful of seasoned, experienced, and elite Shakespeare practitioners and educators.

Every single hand flew up into the air.

After some negotiation, a tiny girl in a pink dress, probably not more than nine or ten years old, stood up. Awww, this is so cute. Is she going to do Puck’s “If we shadows have offended” epil— NOPE. She narrowed her eyes and spat out Cloten’s “meanest garment” speech from Cymbeline with all the vitriol of a rejected privileged white man. My jaw literally dropped. HOW was this possible?

The answer was Christy Burgess. I’d actually met Christy the year before, when I drove down to  South Bend to see a couple shows at the Notre Dame Shakespeare Festival, and she immediately overwhelmed me (in a good way) with her energy, enthusiasm, and passion not just for teaching kids Shakespeare, but for giving them ownership of Shakespeare. Every single one of her students believes that Shakespeare is theirs. I’ll never forget Christy telling me what her students’ reaction was upon meeting a professional Shakespeare company: “Oh, you do Shakespeare too? That’s cute... WE  do Shakespeare.”

On a more personal level, Christy helped shepherd me through the impostor syndrome I suffered from while attending my first conference, giving me the confidence to find my place in the Shakespeare community without constantly apologizing for being “just someone who draws stupid stick figures”. Christy builds people up, and the world is better for it.

1. Who are you? Why Shakespeare?

My name is Christy Burgess and I am the director of the Robinson Shakespeare Company.  I am a teacher, director, and have most recently been christened “Shakespeare Maven” by my friend Julia.

Why Shakespeare? There are so many reasons for “why Shakespeare”. ��The Robinson Shakespeare Company starts in 3rd grade and the first day of our 3rd-6th grade class is one of my favorite all year.  Many of our young actors have waited since kindergarten watching their older siblings or young adults they admire go through the program.  The anticipation and excitement on that first day of class is palpable, because they finally get to do Shakespeare.  It’s also become something that is a little subversive.  There are times when our kids are told “you don’t really like Shakespeare” or “shouldn’t you be playing sports?”, which has the effect of “don’t tell me what I’m supposed to like!”

In a meeting, someone asked one of my students “Why Shakespeare?”  She told a story I hadn’t heard before.  It was right after her father passed, before she went back to school.  She was walking around the track at her high school and passed an elderly white couple.  The woman said to her “shouldn’t you be in school?” to which her husband responded “Mary, don’t you know that’s how people get shot?”

This young woman said “when people walk by me, they might think I’m a hood or a thug, but Shakespeare is mine, something no one can take away from me.”  

When we study plays from Eugene O’Neil or Arthur Miller, it’s the world through their eyes, but when we play Shakespeare, it’s the world through OUR eyes.

2. What moment(s) in Shakespeare always make you laugh?

Scene 3.4 in Twelfth Night always cracks me up!  There’s something about the most non-threatening duel letter from Sir Andrew to Cesario/Olivia and the forced fight that is always funny.

Mya interjects: “Is’t so saucy?” is one of my favorite lines in Shakespeare. It’s such a stupid joke. I don’t care. I love it.

3. What's a favorite Shakespearean performance anecdote?

Every now and then there’s Shakespeare magic.

When I was teaching and directing in Alaska with the Fairbanks Shakespeare Theatre, I had made a comment to my young actors about performing in the rain.  I’m pretty sure they prayed for rain, because our last performance of The Merry Wives of Windsor, it POURED.  The audience ran for cover, but nothing could erase the looks of glee on the actor’s faces.  Falstaff’s line, “let the sky rain potatoes”, pretty much said it all!

In 2017, the Robinson Shakespeare Company (RSC*) was invited, and traveled, to England to perform in Stratford-upon-Avon the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust’s Shakespeare Garden.  The New Place recently opened and we discovered that we were the first group to perform there….if the weather held out.  There were numerous sunshine dances (involving jazz hands), prayers, and wishes.  The day of the performance, there was a storm coming right for us.  It was the closest thing to magic I’ve seen.  It was as if the storm was around us.  In videos, you can see the wind whipping the costume and the slightest drizzle of rain, but we made it!

*I know, I know, the Royal Shakespeare Company, Reduced Shakespeare Company, etc. I like to think of us as the Royal Shakespeare Company’s distant (many times removed), scrappy cousins that will be revealed if we do a deep dive on our genealogy chart.

This memory might be tinged with jet lag, because during the same trip I sat in-between two 12 year olds, who only fell asleep 30 minutes before landing.  When we arrived in Stratford, we were met by the incredible Cait Fannin-Peel (my Shakespeare wife and hero).  Our bed and breakfasts weren’t ready yet, so she took us on a tour of Shakespeare’s Birthplace.  They have an amazing little stage in-between the house and the giftshop where actors were performing bits of Shakespeare.  Cait asked if we would like to perform something.  Jet lagged, sleep deprived, and thrilled, it took about 30 seconds to plan out the opening to Cymbeline and start performing it.  Tourists surrounded us with their cameras and applauded when the scene was done.  It felt amazing as a director of young people to see them confident on stage in a setting that was incredibly different from what they were used to.  We have video evidence!

4. What's one of the more unusual Shakespearean interpretations you've either seen or would like to see?

Bart Sher’s Cymbeline at Intiman changed me.  The set was simple; a red raked stage, but by being so, it didn’t need massive set changes, we were with the story the entire time.  The production was funny, moving, and stunning.

I’m frustrated by Shakespeare that tries to distract you from thinking it is Shakespeare.  I’ve been in, or seen productions, where it’s like “look at these live animals” or “explosions” or “a fake ice rink that isn’t integral to the plot and is really slick in the rain, but look, people are ice skating for 30 seconds” that are unnecessary.  I believe you should be able to wear black clothes on a blank stage and get the story across; everything else is just icing.  If not, it’s not good Shakespeare.

Mya interjects: I am broadly in agreement with Christy here, except that I desperately want MORE live animals on stage. Dogs. Goats. Rabbits. Gerbils. I don’t care if they’re not textually supported.

5. What's one of your favorite Shakespearean "hidden gems"?

I don’t know if it’s a hidden gem, but I love Henry IV, Part 1 and 2.  I think it’s such a loss when they’re combined, because they are both stellar plays for different reasons.  Yes, Henry IV, Part 1 has all the action, but Henry IV, Part 2 has phenomenal speeches and you get to see just how devious Falstaff is.  Food for powder, anyone?

6. What passages from Shakespeare have stayed with you?

This quote from Romeo and Juliet is how I feel about teaching.  During the school week, I am in 24 classes in the South Bend community, mostly in Title 1 schools.  Last year, Tuesdays were long days.  I would teach six classes at a middle school, plus an after-school program, then direct the RSC.  That was approximately 190 kids and the day lasted from 9 am-9 pm.  It wasn’t, however, so bad, because I work with really great kids.  I feel what I give to them, they give back and the days don’t feel long.

“the more I give to thee, The more I have, for both are infinite.”

Juliet, Romeo and Juliet, 2.2

Also “bless you fair shrew” which I say to my dog all the time when she sneezes.  

Mya interjects: BLESS YOU FAIR SHREW THAT’S THE BEST I LOVE IT

7. What Shakespeare plays have changed for you?

The first time I saw Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, I was twelve and locked myself in the bathroom and cried.  Seriously though, who didn’t?  Do you have a heart of stone???

Mya interjects: Yes. :P

During our 2017 trip, we took our RSC to see the REAL RSC’s Titus Andronicus.  Blanche McIntyre is a badass director.  It’s easy to dismiss, Titus, but she found depth, and urgency.  The show made our company better.  

My actors still refer to the performance when we talk about high stakes and urgency.

8. What Shakespearean character or characters do you identify the most with?

I love Viola.  She goes on such a journey and her “make me a willow cabin at your gate” speech moves me every time.  We don’t get to pick who we love.  I’m really lucky that I have a sweetheart who loves me, Shakespeare nerdiness and all.

If I could be a character?  Henry V.

9. Where can we find out more about you? Are there any projects/events you would like us to check out?

You can find more about us on our Facebook page, Instagram, and our website.

Notre Dame Magazine put together a gorgeous website that chronicled the six months they had a reporter with us as well as our adventures to England!

(Back to Mya) Thanks so much to Christy for answering my questions, but, even more importantly, for raising the next generation of Shakespeareans. I, for one, welcome our new Shakespearean overlords.

COMING THURSDAY: It’s two-for-one day with the bard bros behind one of my favorite Shakespeare podcasts!

[shakespearesglobeblog]

Rehearsing for Bartholomew Fair.

Ahead of the riotous play by Ben Jonson opening in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse next week, assistant director Diane Page reflects on the road that led her here and what the 400 year old play means today.

Before becoming part of the Bartholomew Fair company at the Globe, it’s fair to say that my experience and knowledge of Ben Jonson and his work was substantially less than my experience of working with Shakespeare’s texts. When I was studying for my degree, eager to absorb as much knowledge as possible (the dreams of a first year Theatre and Drama Studies student!), I had read about Jonson in a chapter on Jacobean theatre in a book I had picked up in my university library. It mentioned a play called Bartholomew Fair. I found the play, skimmed through it and left it at that.

A few years later I was invited to the Globe with the possibility of assisting on a Jonson play called Bartholomew Fair, directed by Blanche McIntyre. I quickly re-read the play and as soon as I had finished reading I couldn’t believe what I had missed the first time around. It was striking how much this play seemed to mirror much of the London I knew and had grown up in. I laughed because I recognised and knew many of these characters… and this was from a play written over 400 years ago! The lines that the characters had in the play didn’t seem a million miles from how people speak today. Being London born and bred, I was immediately excited by what Jonson’s play could mean to audiences now.

Ben Jonson was born 1572 in Westminster. In his time he was a student at Westminster School, a soldier, a criminal - in 1598 he was imprisoned for a time for killing an actor, Gabriel Spencer. He was a Roman Catholic convert, a poet and a playwright. In 1614 Jonson wrote Bartholomew Fair and it was first performed in the Hope Theatre. Jonson appears to have captured a lot of the essence London, and there’s no doubt he drew inspiration from his own experience of London and the people he knew.

In the play, Jonson throws these characters into a fair where suddenly we, as the audience, get to observe how people of different classes and social statuses move amongst each other and interact. Most interestingly, we get to see how those class and social statuses are largely what these characters are judged on and we get to see how they affect how others engage with them – a lot like now.

When I think of growing up in Bermondsey and the changing landscape of some of the areas in South East London and other areas of London, there are some moments in Jonson’s play that aren’t so different from what I have seen. People from different walks of life still live and experience things side by side. Power and authority and who it belongs to is still as much of a talking point now as it is in Jonson’s play, and we can’t ignore the fact that money always plays a huge part.

Through all of this, comedy does shine through in Bartholomew Fair, but there are moments of darkness in Jonson’s play. And just like Jonson’s London, as much as we all might love London, we can probably agree that it isn’t always fun and games.  

One of the first things Blanche and I spoke about when we first met were the amount of different accents and languages in London, and what an amazing thing that was. In rehearsals the actors have been making choices that are representative of London today, one of these has been in regards to accent.  

Similarly, it has been very enriching for us all to hear the company’s stories about similar events to Bartholomew Fair they’ve experienced in modern London, or what they’ve experience by just living in London and how much we collectively share just by being here. It’s probably even richer as not everyone is originally from London.

As much as now, Jonson’s London was one that wasn’t without its problems. Thinking of the divisions in society in Jonson’s time, it isn’t hard to think of the divisions we face as a society now - and so it makes sense that this production of Bartholomew Fair is set in a contemporary way. The characters that Jonson came across and wrote about are the people we walk past every day and who we interact (or don’t interact) with. In a way nothing has changed. No one is out of place in this city until someone tells them that they are. Although this is a play about London, it’s also a play about people living out and being judged by their social identities.

So, here it is! A snapshot of London, then and now, in all its glory and grittiness.  

Bartholomew Fair opens in the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 23 August 2019.

Photography by Marc Brenner

[willstafford]

Hands Off!

TITUS ANDRONICUS

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Thursday 20th July, 2017

  Shakespeare’s bloodiest play (and a big box office hit during his life) is given a contemporary setting in Blanche McIntyre’s darkly enjoyable production.  Hoodie-wearing plebs pose for selfies in front of pageantry.  A Deliveroo driver turns out to be a hapless messenger, murdered for his bad luck.  It’s all recognisable if…

[bwthornton]

#Stratford #News #RSC #TitusAndronicus Tonight 19.15 Wed 5 Jul Royal Shakespeare Theatre Stratford #Shakespeare

http://stratford-upon-avon-theatre.blogspot.co.uk/2017/06/rsc-titus-andronicus-stratford-uponavon.html

http://www.bwthornton.co.uk/a-midsummer-mouse.php

[heyho-simonrussellbeale]

While other theatres across London are pulling their pantos up on stage, Hampstead remains resolute in its ongoing mission to revive some of the lesser-known Tom Stoppard plays. No dames and innuendoes here. No, instead we get a three-hour dreamlike reflection on Latin love poetry, via the life of scholar and poet AE Housman.

Starting with the death of Housman, met by the mythical ferryman on the shores of the river Styx, with a couple of puns about boating terminology, The Invention of Love spins out plotlessly from there. It cues up speech after speech, difficult to follow, showily clever, taking in aestheticism, manuscript transmission, Oxford in the late 19th century, the origins of the legislation that led to Oscar Wilde’s imprisonment, beastliness, buggery, and much, much, much more. Merry Christmas everyone.

But Blanche McIntyre’s subtle, uncluttered production – taking place on a mostly empty stage – puts all focus on the text (makes sense, given that is what the play is all about) and delivers a pretty good case for the play being, if sometimes impenetrable and partly in Latin and Greek, a bona fide masterpiece.

Although best known now as the author of A Shropshire Lad, Housman was also the greatest classical scholar of his generation and happened to be at Oxford at the same time as Oscar Wilde. Stoppard’s play teases these strands into reflections on what it means to lead a life well-lived, especially for gay men in the 19th century. Wilde lived fearlessly and unashamedly. Housman was the opposite. He was all repression and sublimation of his sexuality into a dedication to classics. On day one of university he falls in love with his sporty, ruddy-cheeked, very straight classmate Moses Jackson and loves him for the rest of his life. He never does anything about it, just quietly pines from afar forever. “I would have died for you but I never had the luck,” he repeats over and over.

Though nothing much happens in the play and it is hard to follow, it’s also weirdly fun to be swept along by speeches ad infinitum about Latin manuscripts – how it’s a miracle that any of them survived at all, at the mercy of monks and mice and moral puritanism for centuries.

And there are several very beautiful moments, not least Simon Russell Beale’s older, cynical Housman – slightly muttery, doddery, needing the loo – sitting next to his younger self, played both gently and intensely by Matthew Tennyson, and arguing the toss about life and love. Older Housman has become obsessed with the placement of commas and the meaning of individual words in poems. Younger Housman reminds him to see the wood for the trees, and to remember that the poems are actually about love. Tennyson stands and almost sings his lines, arms outstretched, showing wonderfully how even love for a subject as seemingly staid as Latin grammar can be enriching and infecting.

That’s where McIntyre really manages to blow a lot of the dust away. Though the production does drag a bit, becoming bogged down in the thickness of its words, when McIntyre homes in on what the play is about – love – it comes alive. There’s Housman’s love of Latin, with Tennyson and Russell Beale delivering long, impassioned, joyful speeches about it. And there’s Housman’s love of Moses Jackson, no less real for its being drenched in shame and the impossibility of its return. This is what the play is about: the invention of love – and the fact that it is reinvented every time it’s felt. Not to mention the fact you’ll feel about a thousand times cleverer after seeing it.