The Royal Shakespeare Company will perform every known piece of writing by Shakespare. Within one year.
That’s damn ambitious and damn cool.
Here are some more details:
- 18 British theatre companies are involved.
- Sir Ian McKellen will play King Lear.
- Dame Judi Dench will be in a musical adaptation of The Merry Wives of Windsor.
- Patrick Stewart to be in The Tempest.
But the Reduced Shakespeare Company does that every night 😉
Just kidding, that is very cool news. Just hope I get the chance to see one of them.
When I was in high school, when Sam Wanamaker was still alive and he was just getting funding for the new Globe, we held a Shakespeare Read-a-thon to help raise funds. We did all of Shakespeare’s work over a weekend. Of course, our group had developed a bit of a reputation for flamboyant reads. (Hmmm…wonder why?) You can probably guess that I was the one to play Richard III. We had a small crowd come in, along with a shy, long-haired, sexually ambiguous guy with an acoustic guitar who played along to our “performance” in an asbestos-ridden classroom and kept batting his eyelashes at me and following me around after our performance was up. (I told him I was flattered, but not interested.)
Related to this, I also staged a scene in my senior drama class with me as Richard III and this really cute metal goth chick as Anne. I fucking loved that play, which was never taught in any of my classes, but which I read and “acted” over and over in my bedroom.
And the bedroom thing…not the way you’re thinking. 🙂
And I will devote the rest of my life to acting out the infinite typings of infinite monkeys — but I guess that’s what I was doing anyways.
And, Ed, I still have the guitar.
I want to go!
When I was nine months pregnant with my daughter, I hosted a reading of winter-themed poetry at the library and read the “Discontent” speech from Richard III, telling everyone that, unlike Richard, I was wearing my hump on the front.