All entries for Tuesday 01 April 2008
April 01, 2008
Regents' Park season
A cry of frustration sounds out over Coventry as London's Regent's Park announces this year's open-air Shakespeare season, and it's as conventional as one could imagine. The 'highlights':
Romeo and Juliet (also being produced this year by Northern Broadsides, the RSC and the Globe Touring company).
Twelfth Night (also being produced this year by Filter and the Donmar, and it's not long since the RSC's).
A Midsummer Night's Dream (also being produced this year by the RSC, Globe and Footsbarn).
Are we fated forever to just have the same few plays done over and over? I'd say there are about eight Shakespeare plays that dominate theatre at the moment- add in Much Ado, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello and Lear and you have the vast majority of current Shakespeare programming.
I'm trying to focus instead on the more interesting productions: the Globe doing Timon of Athens and The Merry Wives of Windsor is extremely encouraging, a high-profile Love's Labour's Lost at the RSC is at least a relatively under-performed play and Cheek by Jowl's Troilus and Cressida is the production I'm most excited about this year.
I'm really starting to get to a point, though, where I'd almost rather companies laid off Shakespeare altogether if they're not going to move away from the same old safe options. At the very least, I'm hoping that some of the above productions do something interesting with the plays. Please?
Peter Kirwan
01 Apr 2008 13:17
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