Tag Archives: fairy

Revisionist Shakespeare is off with the fairies

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Where: The Bridge Theatre, London Bridge, London

When: July 1-3 2025

What: A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare

Today’s productions of William Shakespeare’s plays tend to fall into two categories. There are those which are archly modernist and revisionist. Then there are those which try to retain the spirit and art of the original manuscript – not in a hidebound sense, nor always in Elizabethan dress.

An example of the former would be most of the output of the Royal Shakespeare Company over recent years. Many reviews of their work can be found here on this site1. An example of the latter would be the Cambridge Shakespeare Festival:

“… no knee-bending to trendy revisionism… but rather a tour de force of Elizabethan drama”2

So, where would the current production at the Bridge Theatre fall? In the former or the latter?

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Going Forth With The Shakespearience…

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What: Go Forth With The Shakespearience

Where: Ravenscourt Arts, Hammersmith

Who: The Shakespearience

When: May 2017

One day whilst I was in Stratford-Upon-Avon with the Royal Shakespeare Company, I woke up in my hotel room with a fairly fully formed idea for bringing Shakespeare to schools, using professional actors and musicians, and giving young people a first exposure to live theatre.

It’s now 8 years since we started working with local schools as part of their literature programme. We’ve always worked with the schools in the areas of faith and religious education but we thought as well as enhancing the teaching in those areas, we ought to give back to the community in the areas that God has gifted us in. This has meant that over those years we’ve worked on poetry workshops (with Paul Cookson), performances of Shakespeare and more recently, since Chris Jarvis has joined us in a range of other hands-on activities.

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