Shakespeare in Ten Acts Greg Buzwell
Exhibition Outline • Commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death. • Ten iconic productions that revealed something new about Shakespeare in performance. • Ranging from Shakespeare’s own time to the 21st century. • Including a variety of theatrical performances, and including film and digital interpretations. • Wide variety of exhibits • Informative but also fun. www.bl.uk
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Shakespeare in Ten Acts Paccar Gallery, 15 April – 6 September 2016 To mark the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, this exhibition will explore ten performances that have made Shakespeare the cultural icon he is today. From the first production of Hamlet at the Globe to a digital-age remix, these ten performances chart the evolution of Shakespeare’s reputation across the centuries.
1. ‘A hit, a very palpable hit’ Hamlet at the Globe, about 1600 2. ‘Into something rich and strange’ The Tempest at the Blackfriars Playhouse, about 1610-11 3. ‘The wide world’ Possibly the first performance of Hamlet outside Europe, 1607 4. ‘Do you not know I am a woman?’ A woman acts Shakespeare for the first time, 1660 5. ‘’Tis mad idolatry’ A Shakespeare forgery at Drury Lane, 1796 6. ‘Haply, for I am black…’ The first Black actor to play Othello in Britain, 1825 7. ‘He is return’d’ Shakespeare’s King Lear restored to the stage, 1838 8. ‘The revolution of the times’ Peter Brook’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1970 9. ‘The wheel is come full circle’ Shakespeare’s Globe’s Twelfth Night, 2002 10. ‘Look here upon this picture’ The Wooster Group Hamlet, 2013 www.bl.uk
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Hamlet (Section 1)
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The Tempest (Section 2)
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Women on the stage (Section 4)
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Vivien Leigh – Lady Macbeth (1955)
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream • A very rich and romantic tradition • Numerous extra scenes and extra fairies! • Shakespeare’s text often pushed into the background • Often the first Shakespeare play people would have seen • Never out of fashion • Lends itself to grand spectacle
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Fuseli)
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Victorian Playbill (1847) Theseus, Duke of Athens and the Pageant to celebrate his achievements
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Harley Granville Barker (Feb 1914) ‘What is really needed is a great white box. That’s what our theatre really is’
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1914)
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1935) ‘An invitation to escape reality’, Max Reinhardt. The film starred James Cagney as Bottom, Mickey Rooney as Puck and Anita Louise as Titania.
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Angela Carter and Wise Children (attended Streatham and Clapham High School)
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Angela Carter and Wise Children
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The Fairy Feller’s Master-stroke, by Richard Dadd (painted 1855 – 1864)
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1937) • Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit • Ut tristique lectus a massa tristique accumsan • Integer congue felis nec purus condimentum ultricies • Donec volutpat diam nec sapien lobortis malesuada • Morbi in dolor in lorem faucibus
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1937)
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1937) Vivien Leigh and Robert Helpmann. Interlocking headdresses!
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Peter Brook’s 1970 production. • Stripping away the excess • Returning Shakespeare’s language to the heart of the production • A fresh approach to replace tired motifs • A fresh approach to rehearsals and working as a team • Breaking the barriers between the actors and the audience
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Peter Brook
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The Stage
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Sally Jacobs
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Costumes
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970)
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A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1970)
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On Tour Begins the now commonplace process by which productions go on world tours
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Shakespeare in Ten Acts
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Critical Reception – Positive (mainly) • Sunday Times: ‘More than refreshing, magnificent, the sort of thing one sees only once in a lifetime, and then only from a man of genius’ • Clive Barnes: ‘The most important work yet of the world’s most imaginative and inventive director’ • Newsweek: ‘One of the most beautiful Shakespearean productions of our lifetime’ • New Statesman: ‘remoulded’ … ‘with the help of Billy Smart, Walt Disney, J. G. Ballard and … his own sleeping, hallucinating self’. www.bl.uk
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Conclusion • Hugely influential on later productions of Shakespeare • Being bold can work! • Simultaneously of its time and yet, somehow, it transcends the time in which it was performed. • Still possible to do something new with a play first performed around 370 years earlier.
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Thank you
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