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birthday in the streets or on stage 1
Celebrate Shakespeare’s
Stratford has parades and pageantry, the RSC a new season, and Tennant and Tate will take to the stage in London
April 23 is the date traditionally taken to be Shakespeare’s birthday, and Stratford-upon-Avon will be celebrating in true theatrical style. Street entertainers, a People’s Procession, wandering Shakespearean actors and carnival bands will bring the town to life from 22 to 25 April. The best response to not knowing a precise date of birth is, after all, to make merry for several days straight. The Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford has
a birthday to celebrate in April too, and is launching its new season as a 50th Birthday Programme. This
DON’T MISS... Don’t miss the bard’s best at the Globe
Shakespeare’s Globe in London (left) is celebrating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible and the power of dramatic language with a 2011 season entitled The Word is God. Opening on Easter weekend with a cover-to-cover reading of the Bible, the players will then turn to the bard, with performances of Hamlet (from
www.britain-magazine.com
23 April), All’s Well That Ends Well (from 27 April), As You Like It (from 17 May), and Much Ado About Nothing (from 21 May). Performances later in the season will include Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, about the pleasures and perils
t If calling Britain from overseas, dial your international code, then 44, and drop the first zero
of selling your soul to the devil, and Anne Boleyn (below), by modern-day playwright Howard Brenton, returning after a sell-out run in 2010. The Globe has
also confirmed that it will be building an indoor Jacobean theatre to plans
m
discovered in the Worcester College Library in Oxford. Plays such as The Tempest and The Winter’s Tale were always meant to be performed in intimate indoor spaces, so this new stage will allow for a whole new exploration of the relationship between actor and audience in Shakespeare’s day.
www.shakespeares-globe.org.
BRITAIN 59
will be its first full season of plays performed in the new Royal Shakespeare Theatre (above), reopened along with the smaller Swan Theatre in November after a £112.8m transformation taking three and a half years. The proscenium arch has been replaced by a thrust stage with theatre- goers on three sides, bringing the farthest- away seats 36 feet closer.
Shakespeare plays to see this spring in these new
and improved Stratford venues include Romeo and Juliet (from 3 March), Anthony and Cleopatra (from 3 March), Cardenio, a reimagining of a lost play based on Don Quixote (from 14 April), Macbeth (from 16 April), and The Merchant of Venice (from 13 May). In London, David Tennant and his Doctor Who
costar Catherine Tate (below left) will take to the stage together for the first time on June 1 as Benedick and Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing at the Wyndhams Theatre. The sparkling verbal sparring of these reluctant lovers should be perfectly suited to the pair – best to book early!
www.shakespearesbirthday.
org.uk;
www.rsc.org.uk; www.wyndhams-
theatre.com.
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PHOTO: VISIT BRITAIN IMAGES/EPO ONLINE/ELLIE KURTTZ/THE ROYAL SHAKESPEARE THEATRE
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