Romeo and Juliet is obviously about a young Pakistani girl whose overbearing father wants to marry her off to a cousin, despite her age and wishes. How could it be anything but? ‘Oh dear, please don’t ruin Romeo and Juliet by talking about race!’ said a member of the public when the Globe hosted an anti-racist webinar on the play. You may be thinking this too. But worry not, because the play can’…
Continue reading →
Would you like to spend two hours with David Tennant whispering in your ears? You'd be a fool to say no! The stage is bare, the costumes are monochrome, Pepper's Ghost serves as a backdrop, the audience wears headphones. Is this style over substance? Almost. So let's talk about the schtick. Every actor is wearing a microphone which allows their merest whisper to be picked up. An impressive…
Continue reading →
What is the city but the people? What indeed? David Oyelowo is a powerhouse. His Coriolanus is a shitheel teetering somewhere between Trump and Mugabe. He isn't a noble character with a fatal flaw; his flaws are his character. The citizens celebrate him, turn on him, fear him. It isn't about power corrupting, it's about venal people abusing power structures. There are persistent theories about …
Continue reading →
Everybody knows the story of Juliet and her Romeo. Everybody. It's a cultural touchstone unlike any other. It has been remixed, reinterpreted, reimagined, and probably remastered into 4K 3D. So what can a new production of it bring? Well, for a start, ukuleles. The cast - all six of them - give the prologue in song. Reminding us (in updated English) that we all know what's coming. It had…
Continue reading →
This is selection of essays looking - as the title suggests - at the relationship between Shakespeare and immigration. It's always worth re-examining our relationship with "classic" works. There are some very obvious immigration issues in Shakespeare - and this book does a plausible job of uncovering some of them. It also takes us through some of the issues facing Elizabethan England - for…
Continue reading →
Ira Aldridge -- a black New Yorker -- was one of nineteenth-century Europe's greatest actors. By the time he began touring in Europe he was principally a Shakespearean actor, playing such classic characters as Shylock, Macbeth, Richard III, and King Lear. Although his frequent public appearances made him the most visible black man in the world by mid-nineteenth century, today Aldridge tends to…
Continue reading →
Does the world need yet another film of Macbeth? And this one doesn't even have a shtick like setting it in a space station. And - to make matters worse - it's filmed in black and white, with a 4:3 aspect ratio. What is this, the Snyder cut?!?! And yet… it is perfect. Joel Coen's direction shows exactly what can be accomplished with a set that looks like it is out of a 1960s BBC dramatisation. S…
Continue reading →
The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race shows teachers and students how and why Shakespeare and race are inseparable. Moving well beyond Othello, the collection invites the reader to understand racialized discourses, rhetoric, and performances in all of Shakespeare's plays, including the comedies and histories. Race is presented through an intersectional approach with chapters that…
Continue reading →
For a blog called "shkspr.mobi", I don't blog enough about Shakespeare. Sorry! The brilliant thing about Shakespeare is its versatility. You can do almost anything with it. Mess around with genders, set it in space, make a puppet show. It all just works. Perhaps you've seen a gender-flipped version of one of the minor history plays set in Wales against the Miners' Strike and it was proper…
Continue reading →
