Latest news with #RomeoAndJuliet
RNZ News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- RNZ News
Staging one of the greatest love stories in a 60s thriller
culture arts 44 minutes ago It's one of the greatest and most famous love stories and we already know how it ends before it begins. Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet is now on stage with ATC - reenvisioned in a 60s thriller, high fashion style. Experienced theatre director, Benjamin Kilby-Henson has had a diverse career; taking theatre groups to the Edinburgh Fringe, directed shows for the Pop Up Globe, musicals for Court Theatre - and yet his shows often have a film or cinematic element and feel to them. Benjamin Kilby-Henson speaks to Culture 101 about how he first felt about the idea of bringing Romeo Juliet; such a well-known story to the stage.
Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
Why Shakespeare's Globe is still the best-value night out in London
Shakespeare's plays were so popular in the 16th and 17th centuries because they were good — and because they were cheap. Productions at the Globe, as well as the other theatres that dotted the south side of the Thames, saw audiences cram in, with the cheapest 'seats' being no seats at all, but standing places in the 'pit' below the stage. Few complained, even as their knees no doubt protested, thanks to the quality of what unfolded in front of them. The same holds true in 2025: standing tickets are still only £10, or £5 if you book early enough, and the theatre remains as spectacular as ever. This summer's Romeo and Juliet, for instance, is full of life. Easy to follow and so funny that the audience roars with laughter at all the right moments, the classic romance is reimagined in the Wild West with a vibrant Lola Shalam as Juliet. It is a far cry from the miscommunication and heavy-handed teaching at GCSE that has put generations of students off Shakespeare. For Michelle Terry, the artistic director at Shakespeare's Globe, making theatre accessible is vital to turning around perceptions, and the cheap tickets certainly help. When the Globe reopened in 1997, the £5 'groundling' ticket was a revelation, giving theatregoers the ability to stand as Shakespeare's working-class contemporaries once did. That you can still get in, more than two decades later, for £5 or £10, is nothing short of remarkable. The pricing, Terry reckons, gives audiences the chance to make their mind up about Shakespeare without pressure. While she wants all her audiences to have an 'amazing' experience, the low entry fee gives audiences 'the right to have an opinion'. • Read theatre reviews, guides and interviews 'You can say, I am not having a good time, and I can afford to leave,' she says. 'It affords you [the ability] to gauge what your taste is, what your values are, what your beliefs are, what you think about what's being talked about in the play.' It's a far cry from shows across the river in the West End, where ticket prices often run into the hundreds. When you've paid that much, Terry says with a laugh, 'it better be good'. Theatre at that price point becomes a rare, special occasion. But not so at the Globe, where a groundling ticket makes a trip to the theatre a viable evening out for Gen Zers seeking something more authentic than screen time. Pub gardens are great but here — for less than the price of two pints — you can get almost three hours of entertainment, even if you won't be sitting down. 'When you blow the dust off,' Shalam says, '[the Globe] still feels unbelievably universal.' While access for all is the goal, the team at the Globe are aware of the role that Shakespeare plays in the national curriculum and make every effort to ensure as many students as possible can see its plays. Each year it tries to programme at least one of the GCSE texts, and in 2023-24 more than 120,000 students from over 2,000 schools visited the Globe to see Shakespeare live. Of these, 26,000 tickets were provided free to state secondary schools. And it's easy to see why schools are so keen to get their hands on these tickets. Not only does the Globe bring these plays to life, but it's far easier to believe Shakespeare was one of the most popular playwrights of his time when you're standing beneath the Globe's unique thatched roof — the only one in London after they were banned following the Great Fire of London — leaning on the stage a few feet from the action. 'When you're able to experience Shakespeare performed at the Globe, you're able to hear and see the words instead of being hunched over a school desk,' Shalam says. 'You're able to witness these individuals go on these emotional and life journeys.' • Your guide to life in London: what's new in culture, food and property The Globe benefits from school visitors too: if the performers can hold the attention of a crowd of 14-year-olds, they can hold the attention of anyone. 'Laughs and shouts are almost live feedback, especially those up close, leaning on the stage,' says Sean Holmes, director of this production of Romeo and Juliet. 'You can tell an audience is following the play because they react impulsively.' School visitors aren't the only ones keen to see Shakespeare. Today the Globe truly lives up to its name, with a third of visitors last year coming from abroad, from 147 different countries. For Terry, bringing people together from all walks of life is central to making theatre accessible — especially in today's political climate. 'We are becoming increasingly polarised, isolationist, individualist. But for me theatre is one of our most democratic art forms,' she says. 'You stand next to someone you don't know. You don't know what their religion is. You don't know who they vote for. You probably don't even know what country they've come from.'
Washington Post
03-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
Romeo and Juliet go to the circus
Mercutio and Tybalt have brawled with a spectrum of weaponry since William Shakespeare wrote their lethal quarrel into 'Romeo and Juliet.' The armament of choice has rarely been a teeterboard. In 'Duel Reality,' a diverting R&J riff told through acrobatics and circus feats at Harman Hall, two performers representing these characters vie to execute the most virtuosic techniques from opposite ends of a seesaw-like plank. As one lands, the other hurtles into the air, often ascending to heart-stopping heights and sometimes executing flips, twists and somersaults while plunging back to the terrifyingly narrow board. (Einar Kling Odencrants and Anton Persson fill the roles through July 6; Nino Bartolini and Colin Vuillème swap in Tuesday.)
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shakespeare in war: bard's ‘existential' theatre takes hold in Ukraine
The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life. This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom are estimated to remain in Russian captivity. A couple of women in the crowd, holding a flag showing the face of their beloved, wiped away tears. A small girl in a blue cotton dress held up a sign: 'Be their voice.' Another: 'Without you I am nothing.' A few hours later, audiences gathered for a spectacular promenade production of Romeo and Juliet, staged in an abandoned factory and the theatre's crypt-like basement, watching young lives torn apart by a malign fate. The festival had not been undertaken lightly, said the festival programme director, Iryna Chuzhynova, in a speech at its opening reception. The organisers had asked themselves whether holding a festival was the right thing to do while Ukraine was struggling against the Russian invaders. In the end, she said, 'we agreed that art is not in fact entertainment today'. 'It's true that in the theatre we create an illusion of peaceful life, but it's not peaceful life,' Chuzhynova said later. 'We need to be together. When you're in grief you need others' support. That's why we have these ceremonies, these rituals of theatre.' She said Ukraine was living in 'a moment of concentrated simultaneity' in which normal life and the catastrophe of war were experienced in disturbing proximity. One of the cast of Romeo and Juliet was not in the play that day, she added: he had recently signed a military contract and was already at the front. This year's Shakespeare festival is the city's second, after the organisers decided to forge ahead with 2024's inaugural edition. And, unlikely as it may seem, Shakespeare is booming across Ukraine. A King Lear and two Othellos are in repertoire in major Kyiv theatres; there is also an A Midsummer Night's Dream in the capital, a Hamlet, a Macbeth and a Romeo and Juliet. 'You can always find an intersection to Shakespeare's world in such situations as we have,' said the celebrated poet and translator Yuri Andrukhovych, who has made Ukrainian translations of four Shakespeare plays, including the festival's Romeo and Juliet. 'There is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems: fear, hate, passion, betrayal, the human soul.' There were Shakespeare comedies at the Ivano-Frankivsk festival – The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing – but the programme skewed towards tragedy, with, aside from Romeo and Juliet, two productions of King Lear plus a Richard III and a Macbeth. 'It's important to have a place for tears,' Chuzhynova said. Ivano-Frankivsk is in Ukraine's south-west, hundreds of miles from the frontline in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. But in the third year of Russia's invasion of the country, war hangs everywhere in the air. The pleasant pedestrianised streets of the small city are lined with more than 500 official memorials to the town's fallen, with flags fluttering above their portraits and flowers laid beneath them. The most popular Shakespeare play in Ukrainian theatres since the full-scale invasion has been Macbeth, Chuzhynova said. Its tale of the rise and fall of a tyrant speaks to the moment – most obviously calling to mind Vladimir Putin, but plenty of other authoritarian leaders around the globe. Andrukhovych is about to start work on a new translation with a view to a fresh production. Chuzhynova said Shakespeare had a way of speaking to Ukraine's political upheavals. In the wake of the Orange Revolution of 2004, when Russian-influenced political rhetoric pushed the narrative of 'two Ukraines', east and west, it was Romeo and Juliet, with its warring families, that became popular. After the Maidan protests, instigated in 2013 by students angry with the pro-Russian turn of their then president, Viktor Yanukovych, it was Hamlet that attracted directors: the story of a young man working out his identity while, in the background, a powerful neighbour arms for war. Macbeth had also been important in Ukraine a century ago, said Rostyslav Derzhypilskiy, the director of the Romeo and Juliet production. It was in 1920 in the central Ukrainian village of Bila Tserkva that the visionary director Les Kurbas – later killed in Stalin's purges – staged the first production of the play (and of any Shakespeare play) in the Ukrainian language. This was during the war that ripped through Ukraine after the October revolution of 1917. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion It is the imagined aftermath of one of those performances that provides the setting for a new play at the festival, When the Hurlyburly's Done, by the American playwright Richard Nelson and performed in Ukrainian translation. The all-female cast, from the Theatre on Podil in Kyiv, take on the roles of the women of Kurbas's company who cook, talk and eat together one evening. The characters include Bronislawa Nijinksa, who would later choreograph the radical Stravinsky ballet Les Noces. Nelson said the play was 'about a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of the war to be performed by a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war'. Uncertainty, violence and fear haunt the characters – who nevertheless find solace in each other's company. 'Almost everything in the play is very similar to events happening now,' said one cast member, Yulia Brusentseva. Maria Demenko, another actor, said: 'War is part of our lives and can't be separated from it. It's hard to live with that. Like our characters, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know what decisions we will need to make.' At the end of each festival performance, the actors asked the audience to keep a minute's silence. The devastating news that a member of their company, a popular young actor called Yuriy Felipenko, had been killed at the front had arrived the previous day. 'When people are on the verge of tears anyway, tragedy goes to a different level,' said Prof Michael Dobson, the head of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, who was attending the festival. The contrast between seeing stuff here and back home was 'almost embarrassing', he added. 'In Ukraine the work really means something to the actors and the audience. It's not some routine exercise.' Dobson said Shakespeare was an important figure in Britain during the second world war. John Gielgud toured his famous Hamlet. The film of Henry V starring Laurence Olivier, released in 1944, was a national morale booster. In a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia, the young Denholm Elliott starred as Viola in Twelfth Night. The magical atmosphere of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is intensified by the fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream is being rehearsed while the events of the film play out. Dobson recalled how his own father saw Donald Wolfit as Lear while London was being bombed. His father never saw it again, believing that 'to experience that play's desolating vision of humanity during peacetime would be at best an anticlimax, at worst a sort of profanation'. The Nazis also enjoyed Shakespeare, Dobson pointed out. The celebrated actor Werner Krauss faced a denazification tribunal for, among other offensive depictions, his antisemitic portrayal of Shylock in a 1943 production of the Merchant of Venice in Vienna. He was cleared.
The Guardian
01-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Shakespeare in war: Ukraine festival explores intersection to bard's world
The Ukrainian Shakespeare festival in the city of Ivano-Frankivsk did not open with a play. Another kind of performance was staged on the steps of the theatre, one that did not deal with sad stories of the death of kings but with tragedy unfolding in real life. This was theatre in a different sense: a rally involving several hundred people demonstrating on behalf of Ukrainian prisoners of war, thousands of whom are estimated to remain in Russian captivity. A couple of women in the crowd, holding a flag showing the face of their beloved, wiped away tears. A small girl in a blue cotton dress held up a sign: 'Be their voice.' Another: 'Without you I am nothing.' A few hours later, audiences gathered for a spectacular promenade production of Romeo and Juliet, staged in an abandoned factory and the theatre's crypt-like basement, watching young lives torn apart by a malign fate. The festival had not been undertaken lightly, said the festival programme director, Iryna Chuzhynova, in a speech at its opening reception. The organisers had asked themselves whether holding a festival was the right thing to do while Ukraine was struggling against the Russian invaders. In the end, she said, 'we agreed that art is not in fact entertainment today'. 'It's true that in the theatre we create an illusion of peaceful life, but it's not peaceful life,' Chuzhynova said later. 'We need to be together. When you're in grief you need others' support. That's why we have these ceremonies, these rituals of theatre.' She said Ukraine was living in 'a moment of concentrated simultaneity' in which normal life and the catastrophe of war were experienced in disturbing proximity. One of the cast of Romeo and Juliet was not in the play that day, she added: he had recently signed a military contract and was already at the front. This year's Shakespeare festival is the city's second, after the organisers decided to forge ahead with 2024's inaugural edition. And, unlikely as it may seem, Shakespeare is booming across Ukraine. A King Lear and two Othellos are in repertoire in major Kyiv theatres; there is also an A Midsummer Night's Dream in the capital, a Hamlet, a Macbeth and a Romeo and Juliet. 'You can always find an intersection to Shakespeare's world in such situations as we have,' said the celebrated poet and translator Yuri Andrukhovych, who has made Ukrainian translations of four Shakespeare plays, including the festival's Romeo and Juliet. 'There is a big need for theatre to work with existential problems: fear, hate, passion, betrayal, the human soul.' There were Shakespeare comedies at the Ivano-Frankivsk festival – The Comedy of Errors and Much Ado About Nothing – but the programme skewed towards tragedy, with, aside from Romeo and Juliet, two productions of King Lear plus a Richard III and a Macbeth. 'It's important to have a place for tears,' Chuzhynova said. Ivano-Frankivsk is in Ukraine's south-west, hundreds of miles from the frontline in the foothills of the Carpathian mountains. But in the third year of Russia's invasion of the country, war hangs everywhere in the air. The pleasant pedestrianised streets of the small city are lined with more than 500 official memorials to the town's fallen, with flags fluttering above their portraits and flowers laid beneath them. The most popular Shakespeare play in Ukrainian theatres since the full-scale invasion has been Macbeth, Chuzhynova said. Its tale of the rise and fall of a tyrant speaks to the moment – most obviously calling to mind Vladimir Putin, but plenty of other authoritarian leaders around the globe. Andrukhovych is about to start work on a new translation with a view to a fresh production. Chuzhynova said Shakespeare had a way of speaking to Ukraine's political upheavals. In the wake of the Orange Revolution of 2004, when Russian-influenced political rhetoric pushed the narrative of 'two Ukraines', east and west, it was Romeo and Juliet, with its warring families, that became popular. After the Maidan protests, instigated in 2013 by students angry with the pro-Russian turn of their then president, Viktor Yanukovych, it was Hamlet that attracted directors: the story of a young man working out his identity while, in the background, a powerful neighbour arms for war. Macbeth had also been important in Ukraine a century ago, said Rostyslav Derzhypilskiy, the director of the Romeo and Juliet production. It was in 1920 in the central Ukrainian village of Bila Tserkva that the visionary director Les Kurbas – later killed in Stalin's purges – staged the first production of the play (and of any Shakespeare play) in the Ukrainian language. This was during the war that ripped through Ukraine after the October revolution of 1917. Sign up to This is Europe The most pressing stories and debates for Europeans – from identity to economics to the environment after newsletter promotion It is the imagined aftermath of one of those performances that provides the setting for a new play at the festival, When the Hurlyburly's Done, by the American playwright Richard Nelson and performed in Ukrainian translation. The all-female cast, from the Theatre on Podil in Kyiv, take on the roles of the women of Kurbas's company who cook, talk and eat together one evening. The characters include Bronislawa Nijinksa, who would later choreograph the radical Stravinsky ballet Les Noces. Nelson said the play was 'about a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of the war to be performed by a group of young actresses putting on a play in the middle of a war'. Uncertainty, violence and fear haunt the characters – who nevertheless find solace in each other's company. 'Almost everything in the play is very similar to events happening now,' said one cast member, Yulia Brusentseva. Maria Demenko, another actor, said: 'War is part of our lives and can't be separated from it. It's hard to live with that. Like our characters, we don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. We don't know what decisions we will need to make.' At the end of each festival performance, the actors asked the audience to keep a minute's silence. The devastating news that a member of their company, a popular young actor called Yuriy Felipenko, had been killed at the front had arrived the previous day. 'When people are on the verge of tears anyway, tragedy goes to a different level,' said Prof Michael Dobson, the head of the Shakespeare Institute at Birmingham University, who was attending the festival. The contrast between seeing stuff here and back home was 'almost embarrassing', he added. 'In Ukraine the work really means something to the actors and the audience. It's not some routine exercise.' Dobson said Shakespeare was an important figure in Britain during the second world war. John Gielgud toured his famous Hamlet. The film of Henry V starring Laurence Olivier, released in 1944, was a national morale booster. In a prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia, the young Denholm Elliott starred as Viola in Twelfth Night. The magical atmosphere of Powell and Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death (1946) is intensified by the fact that A Midsummer Night's Dream is being rehearsed while the events of the film play out. Dobson recalled how his own father saw Donald Wolfit as Lear while London was being bombed. His father never saw it again, believing that 'to experience that play's desolating vision of humanity during peacetime would be at best an anticlimax, at worst a sort of profanation'. The Nazis also enjoyed Shakespeare, Dobson pointed out. The celebrated actor Werner Krauss faced a denazification tribunal for, among other offensive depictions, his antisemitic portrayal of Shylock in a 1943 production of the Merchant of Venice in Vienna. He was cleared.
